Securing Synchrophasors Using Data Provenance in the Quantum Era

Trust in the fidelity of synchrophasor measurements is crucial for the correct operation of modern power grids. While most of the existing research on data provenance focuses on the Internet of Things, there is a significant need for effective malicious data detection in power systems. Current methods either fail to detect malicious data modifications or require certain Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) to be physically secured. To solve these issues, this paper presents a new protocol to establish data provenance in synchrophasor networks. The proposed protocol is based on Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and harnesses the principles of quantum unreality and uncertainty. It aims not only to verify the source of data but also to provide robust protection against data tampering. The proposed protocol serves the purpose of devising new protocols to protect our critical infrastructure sectors in the quantum era. Security and performance analyses, along with experiments conducted on IBM’s Qiskit platform, demonstrate that the protocol offers a strong defense against cyberattacks while maintaining a lightweight profile. In particular, the proposed protocol has a worst-case computational complexity of
$O(1)$
, an execution time per packet bounded by the time required to compute a cryptographically secure hash, and an upper bound for the per packet communication overhead of 256-bits. In terms of storage overhead, the proposed protocol requires each PMU to store the output of a cryptographically secure hash function, while the PDC needs to store one challenge-response pair (CRP) for each PMU.