Power System Spoof Detection with a Hybrid Hardware/Software Benchmarking Framework

The integration of monitoring and control networks at different voltage levels and across utility boundaries has made it harder to maintain and assess the resilience of power systems due to increasing cyber attacks. On the software side, a variety of research efforts pursue cyber protection algorithms, such as spoof detection techniques. On the hardware and firmware side, research has demonstrated the feasibility of adversarial attacks by providing an entry point at the device level. This work proposes and evaluates two detection performance metrics for a variety of cyber spoofing attacks introduced in a realistic Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) network for a hybrid transmission and distribution power system. This research finds that both proposed metrics show promise in aiding a spoof detection algorithm in consistently detecting spoofs in power system measurements.