Dangerous attack paths analysis for power networks based on adaptive limited depth search and improved Z-score pruning

Aiming at the problems of low efficiency of attack path search in a large-scale power system, a dangerous attack path search analysis method is proposed, which searches the dangerous attack path in the attack graph of the node threat value quantification to realize the security analysis in the power system. Firstly, the search benefit is defined according to the number of dangerous path changes at different depths, and then the search limit depth of each node is determined by the search benefit. Then, the relative comparison method based on improved Z-score is used to prune the node by considering the node’s characteristics and environment. Finally, an adaptive depth-limited breadth-first search is performed to obtain the attack paths. Experiments show that the proposed method can improve the search efficiency and reduce the search of unnecessary nodes while ensuring the accuracy of the search results of the attack path.