A Control Strategy for the Prevention of Cyber-Physical Switching Attacks on Smart Grids

This paper proposes a novel switched system based control strategy to neutralize cyber enabled switching attacks on smart grids. The focus of this work revolves around demonstrating the immunity of the smart grid against attacks involving the intruder trying to switch the load that is connected to one or more generators on the grid. The work utilizes the concept of Common Lyapunov function (CLF) to maintain the transient stability under any arbitrary switching attack. The stability of the switched system is assessed using Lyapunov's stability theory and the condition for system stability is obtained in terms of sum of square (SOS) constraints. The CLF and control gain are simultaneously estimated in the proposed approach. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is evaluated using numerical simulations, against coordinated switching attacks. It can be observed that the proposed scheme is able to maintain stable grid operation even in the presence of a cyber intrusion.