Safety Verification for Voltage Control in Inverter Dominated Radial Distribution Networks under Actuator and Sensor Adversarial Attacks

Abstract

This paper develops a safety verification framework for inverter-based radial distribution networks under sensor and actuator attacks. Each customer is equipped with a droop-based controller to regulate its voltage within a desirable bound of a reference, i.e., to achieve safety. In our setting, attacks and disturbances enter the droop-based controllers, while actuator attacks corrupt the reactive power injected into the network. Consequently, invariance of the controller state alone does not guarantee compliance with inverter capacities or customer voltage limits. To address this challenge, we derive conditions to guarantee that the reactive power state remains inside a predefined ellipsoid, while at the same time ensuring that the attacked reactive power injections and customer voltages respect predetermined operating limits that hold uniformly for the entire predefined ellipsoid. Together, these conditions guarantee safety under all admissible disturbances and state-dependent sensor and actuator attacks. Finally, we express the resulting containment condition as a linear matrix inequality (LMI) feasibility problem. A five-customer radial network based on the CIGRE benchmark corroborates our theoretical developments in simulations.