Cyber-physical attacks and defences in the smart grid: a survey

By Haibo He, Jun Yan. IET Cyper-Phys. Syst.: Theory & Appl., 2016

425 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The smart grid is arguably one of the most complex cyber-physical systems (CPS). Complex security challenges have been revealed in both the physical and the cyber parts of the smart grid, and an integrative analysis on the cyber-physical (CP) security is emerging. This paper provides a comprehensive and systematic review of the critical attack threats and defence strategies in the smart grid. We start this survey with an overview of the smart grid security from the CP perspective, and then focuses on prominent CP attack schemes with significant impact on the smart grid operation and corresponding defense solutions. With an in-depth review of the attacks and defences, we then discuss the opportunities and challenges along the smart grid CP security. We hope this paper raises awareness of the CP attack threats and defence strategies in complex CPS-based infrastructures such as the smart grid and inspires research effort toward the development of secure and resilient CP infrastructures.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications, Control and Systems Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/15e24c17810150591245b46407877d5039e6451a

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Citations in the corpus

A Survey of IoT-Enabled Cyberattacks: Assessing Attack Paths to Critical Infrastructures and Services (2018, background): “Several surveys [48]–[51] present and categorize cyber-physical attacks on different assets of the smart grid and propose effective security countermeasures.”
A Survey of Physics-Based Attack Detection in Cyber-Physical Systems (2018, background): “Several surveys [34, 43, 48, 59, 65, 99] focus their attention on security and privacy in smart grids and they explore different vulnerabilities in RTUs, IEDs, and smart meters that can be exploited by adversaries.”
The AI-Based Cyber Threat Landscape (2020, background): “Vulnerable interdependent sectors under cyber-physical attacks on the SG [39]. through the controllers deployed in the field to the control center [54].”
A Survey on the Detection Algorithms for False Data Injection Attacks in Smart Grids (2020, background): “Within the same generalized perspective, authors of [17] and [18] give brief reviews of the attack threats and defense strategies in smart grids with vision-ary futuristic challenges to be faced in this area.”
Cyber-physical systems security: Limitations, issues and future trends (2020, positive): “In this section, we present the different types of attacks that target the different aspects of CPS systems, including cyber and physical ones: 1) Physical Attacks: Physical attacks were more active in past years, especially against industrial CPS systems [137], [138].”