Cyber security analysis of power networks by hypergraph cut algorithms

Abstract

This paper presents exact solution methods for analyzing vulnerability of electric power networks to a certain kind of undetectable attacks known as false data injection attacks. We show that the problems of finding the minimum number of measurement points to be attacked undetectably reduce to minimum cut problems on hypergraphs, which admit efficient combinatorial algorithms. Experimental results indicate that our exact solution methods run as fast as the previous methods, most of which provide only approximate solutions. We also present the outline of an algorithm for enumerating all small cuts in a hypergraph, which can be used for finding vulnerable sets of measurement points.