Data integrity attacks and their impacts on SCADA control system

Abstract

Cyber threats for critical infrastructures is an area of growing concern. Data integrity attacks (e.g., manipulating sensor or control signals) on the power system through the SCADA network could have severe effects as it misleads operators into making wrong decisions. However, for an integrity attack to be successful, the malicious data should be within an acceptable range. Hence, only an attacker with intelligence or an understanding of system functionality can cause an effective attack. This paper extends cyber security attack concepts to control systems in an electric power system. Impact on the physical system is estimated by magnitude of load-generation imbalance and frequency deviation after a successful attack on the Automatic Generation Control (AGC) loop. We conduct experiments creating integrity attacks from our attack template on a sample system and evaluate the impact. Our simulation studies show that an integrity attack plan can have severe effects.