Cyber Protection for Malware Attack Resistance in Cyber-Physical Power Systems

In this article, we study how to resist malware attacks in cyber-physical power systems (CPPSs) through cyber protection. A model that incorporates the power flow analysis, the cyber monitoring and control, and the factor of cyber protection is proposed to simulate malware attacks in CPPSs. Meanwhile, an evaluation method is also developed to estimate the effectiveness of different cyber protection strategies. Through simulations, we conduct case studies in a test CPPS generated by coupling the IEEE 118 Bus System with a scale-free communication network. The protection effects of three heuristic cyber protection strategies, namely, target protection, random protection, and acquaintance protection are compared and analyzed. Simulation results reveal that compared with the other two strategies, target protection can suppress malware propagation and resist malware attacks more effectively. Moreover, we also investigate the optimal cyber protection problem in CPPSs and formulate it as a zero-one integer programming problem. We solve the problem by genetic algorithm and find that some low-degree cyber nodes also play a significant role in resisting malware attacks in CPPSs, especially when the protection budget is tight.