On the Use of Safety Critical Control for Cyber-Physical Security in the Smart Grid

The tight coupling between communication and control in cyber-physical systems is necessary to enable the complex regulation required to operate these systems. Unfortunately, cyberattackers can exploit network vulnerabilities to compromise communication and force unsafe decision-making and dynamics. If a cyberattack is not detected and isolated in a timely manner, the control process must balance adhering to the received measurement signals to maintain system operation and ensuring that temporary compromise of the signals does not force unsafe dynamics. For this purpose, we present and employ a safety critical controller based on control barrier functions to mitigate attacks against load frequency control in smart power grids. We validate the paper's findings using simulation on a high-fidelity testbed.