An Evolutionary Game for Integrity Attacks and Defences for Advanced Metering Infrastructure

Smart grids are complex cyber-physical systems that face many security challenges. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), which is one of the main components of the smart grid, represents an important branch of services with increasing deployments that also introduce new security risks. The nodes of AMIs are featured as resource-constrained. Therefore, security attacks including data integrity attacks on AMIs are of serious concern and require efficient selection of protective strategies. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary game framework that models integrity attacks and defenses in an AMI. The aim of this framework is to study possible behaviors of adversaries and to define how the AMI nodes can adaptively select their strategies with maximum payoffs of the nodes. We present a case study and illustrate how the framework can be applied to investigate the integrity threats in AMI systems. We show the evolution process, based on the replicator dynamic.