Moving Target Defense in the Smart Grid

Low-carbon goals, energy crisis, and increasing electricity demand lead to the integration of advanced electronic and communication devices into the smart grid to enable environmental-friendly, real-time, and economic operation and control. However, the vulnerabilities exposed in the IP-based devices and communication networks make the smart grid prone to cyberattacks. For example, the false data injection attack is one of the critical cyberattacks that threatens the system operations such as state estimation, voltage control, economic dispatch, and etc. Observing that the design of cyberattacks on the smart grid depends on the attacker's knowledge of certain key parameters such as the grid topology and line configurations, an innovative defensive mechanism is to proactively perturb these key parameters to prevent the attacker from knowing this related information for constructing cyberattacks. This proactive perturbation strategy is termed as moving target defense (MTD), which mitigates this risk by dynamically altering the power line reactance, making it harder for adversaries to construct effective cyberattacks. Unlike static countermeasures, MTD enhances smart grid cybersecurity by continuously reshaping the attack surface. Since MTD increases the system uncertainty and complexity of the smart grid, the opportunity for the attacker to successfully launch cyberattacks is reduced.