ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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- All Subjects: Electrical Engineering
- Creators: Kosut, Oliver
In the existing state estimation process, there is no defense mechanism for any malicious attacks. Once the communication channel between the SCADA and RTUs is hijacked by the attacker, the attacker can perform a man-in-middle attack and send data of its choice. The only step that can possibly detect the attack during the state estimation process is the bad data detector. Unfortunately, even the bad data detector is unable to detect a certain type of attack, known as the false data injection (FDI) attacks.
Diagnosing the physical consequences of such attacks, therefore, is very important to understand system stability. In this thesis, theoretical general attack models for AC and DC attacks are given and an optimization problem for the worst-case overload attack is formulated. Furthermore, physical consequences of FDI attacks, based on both DC and AC model, are addressed. Various scenarios with different attack targets and system configurations are simulated. The details of the research, results obtained and conclusions drawn are presented in this document.
transportation of power from the sources of power generation via an intermediate
densely connected transmission network to a large distribution network of end-users
at the lowest level of the hierarchy. At each level of the hierarchy (generation/ trans-
mission/ distribution), the system is managed and monitored with a combination of
(a) supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA); and (b) energy management
systems (EMSs) that process the collected data and make control and actuation de-
cisions using the collected data. However, at all levels of the hierarchy, both SCADA
and EMSs are vulnerable to cyber attacks. Furthermore, given the criticality of the
electric power infrastructure, cyber attacks can have severe economic and social con-
sequences.
This thesis focuses on cyber attacks on SCADA and EMS at the transmission
level of the electric power system. The goal is to study the consequences of three
classes of cyber attacks that can change topology data. These classes include: (i)
unobservable state-preserving cyber attacks that only change the topology data; (ii)
unobservable state-and-topology cyber-physical attacks that change both states and
topology data to enable a coordinated physical and cyber attack; and (iii) topology-
targeted man-in-the-middle (MitM) communication attacks that alter topology data
shared during inter-EMS communication. Specically, attack class (i) and (ii) focus on
the unobservable attacks on single regional EMS while class (iii) focuses on the MitM
attacks on communication links between regional EMSs. For each class of attacks,
the theoretical attack model and the implementation of attacks are provided, and the
worst-case attack and its consequences are exhaustively studied. In particularly, for
class (ii), a two-stage optimization problem is introduced to study worst-case attacks
that can cause a physical line over
ow that is unobservable in the cyber layer. The long-term implication and the system anomalies are demonstrated via simulation.
For attack classes (i) and (ii), both mathematical and experimental analyses sug-
gest that these unobservable attacks can be limited or even detected with resiliency
mechanisms including load monitoring, anomalous re-dispatches checking, and his-
torical data comparison. For attack class (iii), countermeasures including anomalous
tie-line interchange verication, anomalous re-dispatch alarms, and external contin-
gency lists sharing are needed to thwart such attacks.
This dissertation studies the physical consequences of unobservable false data injection (FDI) attacks wherein the attacker maliciously changes supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) or phasor measurement unit (PMU) measurements, on the electric power system. In this context, the dissertation is divided into three parts, in which the first two parts focus on FDI attacks on SCADA and the last part focuses on FDI attacks on PMUs.
The first part studies the physical consequences of FDI attacks on SCADA measurements designed with limited system information. The attacker is assumed to have perfect knowledge inside a sub-network of the entire system. Two classes of attacks with different assumptions on the attacker's knowledge outside of the sub-network are introduced. In particular, for the second class of attacks, the attacker is assumed to have no information outside of the attack sub-network, but can perform multiple linear regression to learn the relationship between the external network and the attack sub-network with historical data. To determine the worst possible consequences of both classes of attacks, a bi-level optimization problem wherein the first level models the attacker's goal and the second level models the system response is introduced.
The second part of the dissertation concentrates on analyzing the vulnerability of systems to FDI attacks from the perspective of the system. To this end, an off-line vulnerability analysis framework is proposed to identify the subsets of the test system that are more prone to FDI attacks.
The third part studies the vulnerability of PMUs to FDI attacks. Two classes of more sophisticated FDI attacks that capture the temporal correlation of PMU data are introduced. Such attacks are designed with a convex optimization problem and can always bypass both the bad data detector and the low-rank decomposition (LD) detector.
Universal F-V coding problem for the class of first-order stationary, irreducible and aperiodic Markov sources is first considered. Third-order coding rate of the TS code for the Markov class is derived. A converse on the third-order coding rate for the general class of F-V codes is presented which shows the optimality of the TS code for such Markov sources.
This type class approach is then generalized for compression of the parametric sources. A natural scheme is to define two sequences to be in the same type class if and only if they are equiprobable under any model in the parametric class. This natural approach, however, is shown to be suboptimal. A variation of the Type Size code is introduced, where type classes are defined based on neighborhoods of minimal sufficient statistics. Asymptotics of the overflow rate of this variation is derived and a converse result establishes its optimality up to the third-order term. These results are derived for parametric families of i.i.d. sources as well as Markov sources.
Finally, universal V-F length coding of the class of parametric sources is considered in the short blocklengths regime. The proposed dictionary which is used to parse the source output stream, consists of sequences in the boundaries of transition from low to high quantized type complexity, hence the name Type Complexity (TC) code. For large enough dictionary, the $\epsilon$-coding rate of the TC code is derived and a converse result is derived showing its optimality up to the third-order term.
The impact of channel estimation on spectral efficiency in half-duplex multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) TWR systems is investigated. The trade-off between training and data energy is proposed. In the case that two sources are symmetric in power and number of antennas, a closed-form for the optimal ratio of data energy to total energy is derived. It can be shown that the achievable rate is a monotonically increasing function of the data length. The asymmetric case is discussed as well.
Efficient and accurate training schemes for FD TWRs are essential for profiting from the inherent spectrally efficient structures of both FD and TWRs. A novel one-block training scheme with a maximum likelihood (ML) estimator is proposed to estimate the channels between the nodes and the residual self-interference (RSI) channel simultaneously. Baseline training schemes are also considered to compare with the one-block scheme. The Cramer-Rao bounds (CRBs) of the training schemes are derived and analyzed by using the asymptotic properties of Toeplitz matrices. The benefit of estimating the RSI channel is shown analytically in terms of Fisher information.
To obtain fundamental and analytic results of how the RSI affects the spectral efficiency, one-way FD relay systems are studied. Optimal training design and ML channel estimation are proposed to estimate the RSI channel. The CRBs are derived and analyzed in closed-form so that the optimal training sequence can be found via minimizing the CRB. Extensions of the training scheme to frequency-selective channels and multiple relays are also presented.
Simultaneously sensing and transmission in an FD cognitive radio system with MIMO is considered. The trade-off between the transmission rate and the detection accuracy is characterized by the sum-rate of the primary and the secondary users. Different beamforming and combining schemes are proposed and compared.
Existing approaches such as differential privacy or information-theoretic privacy try to quantify privacy risk but do not capture the subjective experience and heterogeneous expression of privacy-sensitivity. The first part of this dissertation introduces models to study consumer-retailer interaction problems and to better understand how retailers/service providers can balance their revenue objectives while being sensitive to user privacy concerns. This dissertation considers the following three scenarios: (i) the consumer-retailer interaction via personalized advertisements; (ii) incentive mechanisms that electrical utility providers need to offer for privacy sensitive consumers with alternative energy sources; (iii) the market viability of offering privacy guaranteed free online services. We use game-theoretic models to capture the behaviors of both consumers and retailers, and provide insights for retailers to maximize their profits when interacting with privacy sensitive consumers.
Preserving the utility of published datasets while simultaneously providing provable privacy guarantees is a well-known challenge. In the second part, a novel context-aware privacy framework called generative adversarial privacy (GAP) is introduced. Inspired by recent advancements in generative adversarial networks, GAP allows the data holder to learn the privatization mechanism directly from the data. Under GAP, finding the optimal privacy mechanism is formulated as a constrained minimax game between a privatizer and an adversary. For appropriately chosen adversarial loss functions, GAP provides privacy guarantees against strong information-theoretic adversaries. Both synthetic and real-world datasets are used to show that GAP can greatly reduce the adversary's capability of inferring private information at a small cost of distorting the data.