Online Data Integrity Attacks Against Real-Time Electrical Market in Smart Grid

The real-time electrical market operations in smart grid require reliable and accurate data from state estimation. However, state estimation is vulnerable to data integrity attacks, in which strategically manipulated meter measurements can bypass the conventional bad data detection and introduce errors. As a result, it becomes more likely for the attackers to control real-time electrical market through manipulations of meter measurements. In this paper, we first reveal the intrinsic relations between data integrity attacks and real-time electrical market operations, and explicitly characterize their complex interactions as a process simulator. Then a simulation-based global optimization problem is formulated from which attackers could maximize financial incentives through constructed data integrity attacks. More importantly, a novel systematic online attack construction strategy is proposed, such that attackers can launch the desired attacks only by the real-time data streams of meter measurements and no power network topology or parameter information is needed. A corresponding online defense strategy is also presented to detect and identify the malicious measurements without extra meter hardware investments. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed attacking strategies and countermeasure through numerical simulations in IEEE test systems with both synthetic and real data from the New York Independent System Operator.