CASL: A Novel Collusion Attack Against Distributed Energy Management Systems

Recently, the security issues of smart grids have received wide attention. In particular, false data injection attacks against distributed energy management systems (DEMSs) are considered of high importance as they are able to cause economic losses or even damages to system stability in subtle ways. Existing studies have identified many such attacks and proposed corresponding countermeasures. However, in this paper, we show that DEMS is still insecure and in risk of economic loss by proposing and analyzing a novel attack called Collusion Attack between a Storage and a Load (CASL). In CASL, a distributed energy storage device colludes with a load by injecting an abnormal extra power supply to the load in a secret way through using two secret functions. In this way, the colluding pair behaves as normal ones in both computational and communicational viewpoints. We theoretically prove the convergence of DEMS in presence of the attack, and derive an upper bound of the social welfare losses of DEMS caused by CASL. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CASL through simulations.