Stealthy Data Integrity Attack Against Consensus-Based Distributed Energy Management Algorithm

Consensus-based distributed energy management (DEM) algorithm is a promising approach to manage distributed energy resources in microgrids. However, it introduces new risks of cyber-attacks to microgrids. This article proposes a new data integrity attack against consensus-based DEM algorithm, which enables the attacker to manipulate the power scheduling result of the attacked node and ultimately compromise its economic benefits. Specifically, we design a method to infer the privacy data of the attacked node from its broadcast information, and then use the inferred privacy data to design the false data that can manipulate the power scheduling result of the attacked node. The proposed method includes an analysis of the relationship between the difficulty of launching such an attack and the system topology, some findings contribute to designing a more secure communication topology. The attack offers higher stealthiness as it does not break power balance and the consistency of consensus variables, its effectiveness is verified on a 16-node microgird.