Spurious power consumption data reported from compromised meters controlled by organized adversaries in the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) may have drastic consequences on a smart grid’s operations. While existing research on data falsification in smart grids mostly defends against isolated electricity theft, we introduce a taxonomy of various data falsification attack types, when smart meters are compromised by organized or strategic rivals. To counter these attacks, we first propose a coarse-grained and a fine-grained anomaly-based security event detection technique that uses indicators such as deviation and directional change in the time series of the proposed anomaly detection metrics to indicate: (i) occurrence, (ii) type of attack, and (iii) attack strategy used, collectively known as attack context . Leveraging the attack context information, we propose three attack response metrics to the inferred attack context: (a) an unbiased mean indicating a robust location parameter; (b) a median absolute deviation indicating a robust scale parameter; and (c) an attack probability time ratio metric indicating the active time horizon of attacks. Subsequently, we propose a trust scoring model based on Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, that embeds the appropriate unbiased mean, the median absolute deviation, and the attack probability ratio metric at runtime to produce trustmore »
Detection and Forensics against Stealthy Data Falsification in Smart Metering Infrastructure
False power consumption data injected from compromised
smart meters in Advanced Metering Infrastructure
(AMI) of smart grids is a threat that negatively affects both
customers and utilities. In particular, organized and stealthy
adversaries can launch various types of data falsification attacks
from multiple meters using smart or persistent strategies. In this
paper, we propose a real time, two tier attack detection scheme
to detect orchestrated data falsification under a sophisticated
threat model in decentralized micro-grids. The first detection
tier monitors whether the Harmonic to Arithmetic Mean Ratio of
aggregated daily power consumption data is outside a normal
range known as safe margin. To confirm whether discrepancies
in the first detection tier is indeed an attack, the second detection
tier monitors the sum of the residuals (difference) between the
proposed ratio metric and the safe margin over a frame of multiple
days. If the sum of residuals is beyond a standard limit range,
the presence of a data falsification attack is confirmed. Both the
‘safe margins’ and the ‘standard limits’ are designed through
a ‘system identification phase’, where the signature of proposed
metrics under normal conditions are studied using real AMI
micro-grid data sets from two different countries over multiple
years. Subsequently, we show how the proposed metrics trigger
unique signatures under various attacks which aids in attack
reconstruction and also limit the impact more »
- Award ID(s):
- 1818901
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10098813
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 1 to 1
- ISSN:
- 1545-5971
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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