Blockchain-Enabled Cyber-Resilience Enhancement Framework of Microgrid Distributed Secondary Control Against False Data Injection Attacks

Abstract

False data injection attacks (FDIA) pose a significant threat to the microgrids by corrupting information exchange among controller units. An effective solution to enhance the cyber-resilience is urgently needed, given the unbalanced advantages between the attacker and defender. To mitigate this issue, a proposed framework for enhancing cyber-resilience leverages the intrinsic security of blockchain technology to replace vulnerable information exchange and computation with secure transactions. Unlike the current approaches in the control field with limited cyber-resilience, this framework considers both the communication and control fields. Smart contracts (SCs) deployed on an enterprise-level HyperLedger blockchain provide distributed secondary control and self-healing functions, securing microgrid secondary control against FDIAs in a zero-trust environment. The proposed framework is validated through a four-DG microgrid system on a hardware-in-the-loop testbed. The results demonstrate that the framework provides comparable distributed control performance to conventional approaches, even in cases where the intensity of the FDIA launched exceeds the theoretical fault-tolerance of the blockchain technology.