Online Robust PCA for Malicious Attack-Resilience in Wide-Area Mode Metering Application

This paper presents a method for detecting and correcting malicious data corruptions in phasor measurement unit (PMU) measurements. Detection of malicious injections is formulated as a compressed sensing problem and the actual signals are recovered using an online robust principal component analysis-based algorithm. Different patterns of malicious injection attacks on PMU data are considered and the effect of corruption and reconstruction using the algorithm is analyzed on a wide-area mode metering application. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been evaluated with different subspace selection. A suitable threshold for the algorithm is selected by a graphical analysis of the receiver operating characteristics curve. Data from a 16-machine, 5-area New England-New York system is used along with a recursive modal estimation algorithm to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach under ambient and transient conditions.