Physical Impact Analysis of Cyberattacks on Inverter-based Consumer Energy Resources

The increasing adoption of Consumer Energy Resources shifts security concerns toward the edge of the grid.Traditional security models, which focus on protecting a small number of large infrastructure components, do not fully apply to this new paradigm.Despite extensive research on attack types and mitigation strategies, there is less research into the feasible impact of such attacks on distributed energy systems and their components.In this work, we begin at the end of a typical attack by exploring reasonable physical impacts an adversary may seek to cause in an inverter-based Consumer Energy Resource or the distribution grid.To achieve this, simulation models capable of portraying the edge cases caused by an attack are required.Thus, we identify various cyberattacks and their impacts on smart inverters from the literature.A selection of these attacks are then chosen for simulation.Our simulation results demonstrate that the expected impacts of these attacks manifest as intended.The methodology introduced in the present paper can be used as a template for implementing and evaluating the physical impacts of other cyberattacks on power systems.The simulation models are available as open source.