Hidden Electricity Theft by Exploiting Multiple-Pricing Scheme in Smart Grids

With the development of demand response technologies, the pricing scheme in smart grids is moving from flat pricing to multiple pricing (MP), which facilitates the energy saving at the consumer side. However, the flexible pricing policy may be exploited for the stealthy reduction of utility bills. In this paper, we present a hidden electricity theft (HET) attack by exploiting the emerging MP scheme. The basic idea is that attackers can tamper with smart meters to cheat the utility that some electricity is consumed under a lower price. To construct the HET attack, we propose an optimization problem aiming at maximizing the attack profits while evading current detection methods, and design two algorithms to conduct the attack on smart meters. Moreover, we disclose and exploit several new vulnerabilities of smart meters to demonstrate the feasibility of HET attacks. To protect smart grids against HET attacks, we propose several defense and detection countermeasures, including selective protection on smart meters, limiting the attack cycle, and updating the billing mechanism. Extensive experiments on a real data set demonstrate that the attack could cause high economic losses, and the proposed countermeasures could effectively mitigate the attack’s impact at a low cost.