Dynamic Load Altering EV Attacks Against Power Grid Frequency Control

Abstract

Due to growing environmental concerns, the world's governments have been encouraging the shift of the transportation sector towards the adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs). As a result, EV numbers have been growing exponentially and are expected to continue growing further which will add a large EV charging load to the power grid. To this end, this paper presents an EV-based defense mechanism against Load-Altering (LA) attacks targeting the grid. The developed mechanism utilizes H-∞ controllers and Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) to mitigate LA attacks. After the controller synthesis and presentation of the attack scenarios, we demonstrate the effectiveness and success of our defense mechanism against the three known types of LA attacks. The scenarios include three 800 MW LA attacks against the New England 39-bus grid. The results demonstrate how our EV-based mitigation scheme eliminates the attack impacts and maintains the grid's stability in face of an unknown persisting attack.

Edge-Based Detection and Localization of Adversarial Oscillatory Load Attacks Orchestrated By Compromised EV Charging Stations

“…• Dynamic attacks: the size and the trajectory of the compromised load is determined by the attacker based on the grid behavior to achieve and maximize the impact on the grid instability [38].…”

“…Furthermore, other oscillatory load attacks can be used to force different types of oscillations, such as exciting sub-synchronous resonance [40]. Finally, in the dynamic attack scenario, the adversary induces forced oscillation without the need to excite a specific unstable mode present in the power grid [38].…”

Protecting the future grid: An electric vehicle robust mitigation scheme against load altering attacks on power grids

“…The third LA attack is the dynamic attack described in [11] and [12]. During the reconnaissance phase, the attacker gathers information about the power grid's topology and parameters to build a state-space model of the system [11].…”

“…This state-space is then used to craft the attack as a feedback controller that manipulates the magnitude and oscillation frequency of the compromised load to shift the grid's eigenvalues to unstable operation regions. In [12] the feedback gain was calculated using LMIs and caused the generators to oscillate against each other and the frequency to deviate beyond the 2.5% limit tripping the generators. The dynamic attack load is tailored to the instantaneous changes in the grid's response.…”

“…LA attacks can be broadly classified into 3 subfamilies which are static attacks [7] [8] switching attacks [9] [10], and dynamic attacks [11] [12]. These LA attacks are stealthier and stronger than attacks targeting the grid's cyber layer alone as demonstrated below.…”