Stealthy False Data Injection Attacks against State Estimation in Power Systems: Switching Network Topologies

The stealthy false data injection attack against the state estimation in a power network is able to compromise the measurements and fool the system operator without being detected by the residue based detector. While the most of the existing articles assume the network topology to be fixed, we show the effects of unfixed topologies on such attacks. Motivated by such effects, we propose a new mechanism in which the system operator is trying to eliminate the possibility of such attacks via strategically shutting down some of the transmission lines by turns and therefore switching the network topologies. We give the conditions that have to be satisfied in order to achieve this elimination. The vulnerable measurements in the network are formulated in the case when this elimination is impossible. Some simulation analysis are shown as well.