False data injection in distribution system: Attacker's perspective

The distribution system is digitizing and occupying cyberspace with the help of information and communication technologies (ICTs). It is vulnerable to cyber-attacks like false data injection (FDI) and denial-of-services (DoS). However, limited research on cyber-attacks in the distribution system is reported in the literature, and these attacks are of serious concern to distribution system operators (DSOs). The DSO's primary challenge is to understand the attacker's perspective for FDI attack construction. Thus, the work presented in this paper aims to provide an in-depth insight for DSO to apprehend the attacker's perspective, attack flow, and the nature of the FDI attack vector. The prior knowledge of attack flow to DSO can help to protect critical infrastructures from cyber-attacks. Thus, this work comprehends the attacker's behaviour for deploying the optimal budget to disrupt the distribution system operation therein by injecting a stealthy FDI vector. The attacker is resource-constrained in terms of budget and network information. Therefore, the optimal budget for attack initiation is proposed and formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem to minimize the investment and maximize the economic loss for the DSO. Constructing the attack vectors for the attacker is challenging in the limited network information. It is complex because of network characteristics such as multi-phase configurations & an unbalanced nature, and higher resistance to reactance (r/x) ratio. Thus, the FDI attack vector construction is proposed based on non-linear programming optimization and sensitivity analysis considering partial information from the distribution system. The simulation results are presented and compared with available methods in the literature to validate the efficacy of the proposed methods.