Application of wide area power system measurement for digital authentication

The Electric Network Frequency (ENF) analysis of a digital recording is a two-step process. First, an ENF extraction algorithm is applied to the recording and the second step is comparing the extracted target sequence to subsequences contained in a grid reference database. In this paper, a new comparison algorithm is created that can remove the effects of oscillator errors from comparisons. Another study is to have a better understanding of the phenomenology by which sinusoidal grid signals find their way onto digital recordings. In addition, a study that uses both frequency and phase angle is done to determine whether tampering has occurred in digital recordings. Besides being able to determine the recording time, a study that distinguishes the frequency from different locations is performed to possibly determine the location of the recording.