Critical-Area-Based Stochastic DoS Attack Strategy Design Against Remote State Estimation in Multi-Area Power Systems

This letter focuses on the design of a novel critical-area-based (CAB) stochastic denial-of-service (DoS) attack strategy aimed at diminishing the quality of remote state estimation in multi-area power systems. This attack strategy features two main characteristics: firstly, unlike most existing DoS attack models which typically overlook system information, the proposed CAB stochastic DoS attack strategy can selectively target critical areas of the power system, and the more severe impacts on system performance are expected. Secondly, the proposed attack strategy is stochastic, offering enhanced concealment compared to continuous or uniformly distributed DoS attack models. Furthermore, when the attacker faces energy constraints, an analytical relationship between the upper bound of the attack parameter and the expected total number of attacks is derived. Simulation results conducted on IEEE 39-bus and 118-bus systems validate that, compared to existing models, the proposed CAB stochastic DoS attack strategy induces more substantial disruptions in power system estimation quality, thus confirming its effectiveness from the attacker's perspective.