Measures of power grid vulnerability are often assessed by the amount of damage an adversary can exact on the network. However, the cascading impact of such attacks is often overlooked, even though cascades are one of the primary causes of large-scale blackouts. This paper explores modifications of transmission line protection settings as candidates for adversarial attacks, which can remain undetectable as long as the network equilibrium state remains unaltered. This forms the basis of a black-box function in a Bayesian optimization procedure, where the objective is to find protection settings that maximize network degradation due to cascading. Extensive experiments reveal that, against conventional wisdom, maximally misconfiguring the protection settings of all network lines does not cause the most cascading. More surprisingly, even when the degree of misconfiguration is resource constrained, it is still possible to find settings that produce cascades comparable in severity to instances where there are no constraints.

翻译：电网脆弱性的评估通常依据攻击者能够对网络造成的损害程度进行衡量。然而，尽管级联故障是大规模停电的主要原因之一，此类攻击的级联影响却常常被忽视。本文探讨了将输电线路保护设置的修改作为潜在攻击手段的可能性，只要网络平衡状态保持不变，这种修改便可保持不可检测性。这构成了贝叶斯优化过程中黑箱函数的基础，其目标是寻找能因级联效应而最大化网络退化的保护设置。大量实验表明，与传统认知相反，对所有网络线路的保护设置进行最大程度的错误配置并不会引发最严重的级联故障。更令人意外的是，即使在错误配置程度受资源约束的情况下，仍有可能找到能产生与无约束条件下严重程度相当的级联故障的设置。