Research

Cyber attacks on electricity markets

malware
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I have analyzed possible cyber attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of electricity markets. For example, an adversary can compromise IoT devices to manipulate the information that costumers use to make decisions (e.g., prices of electricity). Such attacks can change the system’s state as well as the market equilibrium, which can in turn benefit some of the market’s participants or cause blackouts.

example attack on bids

An attack that delays the bids can lead to a higher market clearing price

example impact attack on bids |

Smart appliances, observing high prices, may try to delay their operation until prices are low. Thus, a sudden drop in the prices can induce peaks of demand

Similar works have been proposed in the literature; however, they often consider heuristic attacks. On the contrary, in this work I formulate the ideal goal of an attacker and then find the precise attack that can be implemented to achieve such outcome. Part of this research also focused on designing detection schemes and penalties to make this kind of attacks unprofitable.

Selected publications

  1. C. Barreto, A. A. Cardenas, N. Quijano, and E. Mojica-Nava, “CPS: Market Analysis of Attacks Against Demand Response in the Smart Grid”, in Proceedings of the 30th annual computer security applications conference, ACSAC ’14 (2014), pp. 136–145.

  2. C. Barreto and A. A. Cardenas, “Detecting fraud in demand response programs”, in 2015 54th ieee conference on decision and control (cdc) (Dec. 2015), pp. 5209–5214.

  3. C. Barreto and A. A. Cardenas, “Impact of the market infrastructure on the security of smart grids”, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics 15, 4342–4351 (2019).

  4. C. Barreto, T. Eghtesad, S. Eisele, A. Laszka, A. Dubey, and X. Koutsoukos, “Cyber-attacks and mitigation in blockchain based transactive energy systems”, in 2020 ieee conference on industrial cyberphysical systems (icps), Vol. 1 (June 2020), pp. 129–136.

  5. S. Eisele, C. Barreto, A. Dubey, X. Koutsoukos, T. Eghtesad, A. Laszka, and A. Mavridou, “Blockchains for transactive energy systems: opportunities, challenges, and approaches”, Computer 53, 66–76 (2020).