Moving Target Defense in the Smart Grid

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical foundations of moving target defense (MTD), the optimal deployment of this defense strategy, and the deep impact of MTD on the system’s operation and control. This book begins with a thorough literature review and summarizes the cyber-based, physical-based, and cyber-physical coordinated MTD approaches. A detailed theoretical analysis is provided to validate the effectiveness and completeness of MTD in terms of detecting and mitigating cyberattacks. Furthermore, the hiddenness of MTD is deeply analyzed from the attacker’s perspective, leading to the development of a coordinated defense framework to enhance the MTD’s hiddenness. Given the complexity resulted from the nonlinear AC state estimation, sensitivity-based approximation methods are proposed to quantify the effectiveness and hiddenness of MTD in AC power systems, forming the basis of an optimization framework to balance the MTD’s effectiveness between hiddenness. Finally, considering the proactive activities caused by MTD, its impact on the system’s operation and control, including the operation cost, load frequency control, and small signal stability is theoretically and numerically analyzed. This book concludes by discussing future research directions and practical strategies for deploying MTD. The presented MTD design and the corresponding research results covered in this book provide valuable insights for practical MTD deployment and motivate new ideas for strengthening smart grid cybersecurity.

Observing that the design of cyberattacks on the smart grid depends on the attacker’s knowledge of certain key parameters such as the grid topology and line configurations, an innovative defensive mechanism is to proactively perturb these key parameters to prevent the attacker from knowing this related information for constructing cyberattacks. This proactive perturbation strategy is termed as MTD, which mitigates this risk by dynamically altering the power line reactance, making it harder for adversaries to construct effective cyberattacks. Unlike static countermeasures, MTD enhances smart grid cybersecurity by continuously reshaping the attack surface. Since MTD increases the system uncertainty and complexity of the smart grid, the opportunity for the attacker to successfully launch cyberattacks is reduced.


This book targets researchers and graduate students seeking a comprehensive understanding of the latest developments in MTD for smart grid cybersecurity. Industry professionals will also find this book valuable as a reference. Designed for readers with a background in Electrical & Computer Engineering, Telecommunications, Computer Science, or related disciplines, it provides the necessary foundation to explore advanced defense strategies.