Detection-triggered recursive impact mitigation against secondary false data injection attacks in cyber-physical microgrids

The cybersecurity of microgrid has received widespread attentions due to the frequently reported attack accidents against distributed energy resource (DER) manufactures. Numerous impact mitigation schemes have been proposed to reduce or eliminate the impacts of false data injection attacks (FDIAs). Nevertheless, the existing methods either requires at least one neighboring trustworthy agent or may bring in unacceptable cost burdens. This paper aims to propose a detection-triggered recursive impact mitigation scheme that can timely and precisely counter the secondary FDIAs (SFDIAs) against the communication links among DERs. Once triggering attack alarms, the power line current readings will be utilised to observe the voltage bias injections through the physical interconnections among DERs, based on which the current bias injections can be recursively reconstructed from the residuals generated by unknown input observers (UIOs). The attack impacts are eliminated by subtracting the reconstructed bias from the incoming compromised data. The proposed mitigation method can work even in the worst case where all communication links are under SFDIAs and only require extra current sensors. The bias reconstruction performance under initial errors and system noises is theoretically analysed and the reconstruction error is proved to be bounded regardless of the electrical parameters. To avoid deploying current sensors on all power lines, a cost-effective deployment strategy is presented to secure a spanning tree set of communication links that can guarantee the secondary control performance. Extensive validation studies are conducted in MATLAB/SIMULINK and cyber-physical microgrid testbeds to validate the proposed method’s effectiveness against single/ multiple and continuous/discrete SFDIAs.