Not Everything is Dark and Gloomy: Power Grid Protections Against IoT Demand Attacks

This paper discusses and characterizes the impacts of Internet of Things (IoT) demand attacks on the secure operation of power transmission grids. Increasingly, Internet connections are available to devices with high energy consumption such as air conditioners and water heaters. However, these new connections expose the control of new electric loads to potential manipulation by attackers. In this paper we investigate the impacts of this potential IoT demand manipulation attack on power transmission grids. Our work has focused on developing a cascading outage analysis (COA) tool to model in detail conditions that can lead to cascading outages in large power grids. In this paper, we apply our tool to a large North American regional transmission interconnection system consisting of more than 5,000 buses, and study how IoT demand attacks can affect the power system assuming that attackers gained full control of a portion of the system demand. To help assess the effects of such cyber attacks, we develop numerical experiments and define different types of IoT demand attacks to study the cascading failures on transmission lines and the interruptions to the system frequency.