Detection of Stealthy attacks on Electric Grids Using Transient Analysis

The information which is transferred over supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and by phasor measurement units (PMUs) in an electric grid is vulnerable to a variety of cyber attacks. In this paper, a technique is proposed to detect stealthy attacks that were injected on SCADA and PMU measurements. This technique uses the principle that any state change will be accompanied by a respective transient as the electric grid has its own inherent dynamics. Since SCADA is unable able to pick up such transients, Thevenin based equivalent has been used to conduct the transient analysis and compared against the PMU measurements. The proposed method has been tested on the IEEE 14-bus system and the results have been presented. It is shown that the proposed technique is able to detect the presence of attack even if both SCADA and PMU measurements have been compromised.