Detection and Identification of Cyber and Physical Attacks on Distribution Power Grids With PVs: An Online High-Dimensional Data-Driven Approach

Cyber and physical attacks threaten the security of distribution power grids. The emerging renewable energy sources such as photovoltaics (PVs) introduce new potential vulnerabilities. Based on the electric waveform data measured by waveform sensors in the distribution power networks, in this article, we propose a novel high-dimensional data-driven cyber physical attack detection and identification (HCADI) approach. First, we analyze the cyber and physical attack impacts (including cyber attacks on the solar inverter causing unusual harmonics) on electric waveforms in the distribution power grids. Then, we construct a high-dimensional streaming data feature matrix based on signal analysis of multiple sensors in the network. Next, we propose a novel mechanism including leverage score-based attack detection and binary matrix factorization-based attack diagnosis. By leveraging the data structure and binary coding, our HCADI approach does not need the training stage for both detection and the root cause diagnosis, which is needed for machine learning/deep learning-based methods. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first attempt to use raw electrical waveform data to detect and identify the power electronics cyber/physical attacks in distribution power grids with PVs.