The Economic Impacts of Household Level Smart Meter Manipulation Attack

The impact analysis of cyber-attacks on the modern power system is of great importance for researchers to grasp more precise information of adversaries, especially for contemplated cyber-attacks that may happen in the future. Different from studies based on existing proposed cyber-attacks, this paper proposes a new kind of cyber-attack which is launched on the demand side, namely, household level smart meter manipulation attack. It achieves attacking goals by manipulating household's smart meter measurements. And the attacking goals are diverse, either achieving huge economic losses to customers or causing security problems to the power grid. Instead of studying one specific model, this paper mainly focuses on the economic impact analysis for households to seek the relationship between the maximum electricity fee deviation and the tampering ratio by simulations. Six scenarios are proposed to simulate three kinds of situations: single household target, multiple household target, and whole society target. Conclusions and future works are also listed.