Hidden Moving Target Defense in Smart Grids

Recent research has proposed a moving target defense (MTD) approach that actively changes transmission line susceptance to preclude stealthy false data injection (FDI) attacks against the state estimation of a smart grid. However, existing studies were often conducted under a less adversarial setting, in that they ignore the possibility that an alert attacker can also try to detect the activation of MTD and then cancel any FDI attack until they learn the new system configuration after MTD. Indeed, in this paper, we show that this can be achieved easily by the attacker. To improve the stealthiness of MTD against the attacker, we propose a hidden MTD approach that maintains the power flows of the whole grid after MTD. We develop an algorithm to construct the hidden MTD and analyze its feasibility condition when only a subset of transmission lines can adjust susceptance. Simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the hidden MTD against alert attackers under realistic settings.