Transactive Energy to Guard against a Zero-Day Load Altering Attack on Power Distribution Systems

• Published in: 2019 IEEE 7th International Conference on Smart Energy Grid Engineering (SEGE) pp. 171 - 177
• Main Authors: Yankson, Samuel, Ghamkhari, Mahdi
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.08.2019
• Subjects: cyber security; Cyberattack; demand response; Generators; load altering attacks; Load management; Power demand; Power distribution; power distribution systems; Power grids; Transactive energy; wholesale electricity market; zeroday exploits
• ISSN: 2575-2693
• DOI: 10.1109/SEGE.2019.8859794

Zero-day cyber attacks against a system are novel attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in the system not known to the developers of the system. Accordingly, zero-day attacks can cause severe damages to the target system since they are not defended against. In this paper a zero-day load altering attack against power distribution systems is introduced. The zero-day attack exploits the mutual dependency of the price of electricity and the power consumption of the flexible loads in demand response programs. Through numerical simulations, it is shown that the zero-day attack amplifies the negative impact of the compromised electric loads on the power distribution systems by a factor of 86, making a much more devastating impact on the distribution systems. The extreme danger of the zero-day attack is demonstrated by bolding the shortcomings of the conventional attack prevention technique in forestalling the zero-day attack. To avert such dangers, a novel approach is proposed to guard against the zero-day attack in a transactive energy framework. Numerical Simulations on IEEE 33-bus standard system validate the effectiveness of the transactive energy framework in safeguarding power distribution systems.