False Data Injection Attacks on Contingency Analysis: Attack Strategies and Impact Assessment

In this paper, a new class of false data injection attacks (FDIAs) on contingency analysis (CA) through state estimation (SE) is proposed, and the economic impact of the proposed attacks on real-time power market operations is quantified. Compared with the existing FDIAs, where no contingency analysis is considered for attack targets, we present a new attack strategy with which the adversary stealthily drops or adds contingency pairs of transmission line flows from or to a normal contingency list by misleading the CA process through injecting false data into SE. The manipulated contingency pairs are then embedded as security constraints into operating constraints of security-constrained economic dispatch. As a result, the proposed attacks lead to the miscalculation of locational marginal price (LMP) in real-time power markets. The capability and economic impact of the proposed attack, such as a list of manipulated contingency line pairs, attack effort, and LMP deviation from normal price, are illustrated in the IEEE 14-bus system.