A Resilient Scheme for Mitigating False Data Injection Attacks in Distributed DC Microgrids

Although DC microgrids using a distributed cooperative control architecture can avoid the instability or shutdown issues caused by a single-point failure as compared to the centralized approach, limited global information in the former makes it difficult to detect cyber attacks. Here, we present a false data injection attack (FDIA)–-termed as a local control input attack–-targeting voltage observers in the secondary controllers and control loops in the primary controllers. Such an attack cannot be detected by only observing the performance of the estimated voltage of each agent, thereby posing a potential threat to the system operation. To address this, a detection method using the outputs of the voltage observers is developed to identify the exact location of an FDIA. The proposed approach is based on the characteristics of the distributed cooperative network and avoids heavy dependency on the system model parameters. Next, an event-driven mitigation approach is deployed to substitute the attacked element with a reconstructed signal upon the detection of an attack. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed resilient scheme is validated using simulation results.