Priority-Based Protection Against the Malicious Data Injection Attacks on State Estimation

In the modern age, the Internet of Things forms the basis of all the infrastructures for improving efficiency, reliability, and comfort. As applied to the power system, increasing the penetration of information and communication technologies at the device and process level is enabling devices to communicate with each other, thereby, facilitating wide-area situational awareness of the power grid. Dependence on the communication infrastructure has also made the power grid vulnerable to cyber-intrusions. Cybersecurity of the power system is a huge concern, which must be addressed with topmost priority. Securing all the entry points for cyber-attacks may not be economically feasible; hence, a critical set of sensors must be identified and secured to protect the grid against malicious actors. In this article, we propose a defense strategy to select the most critical measurements for securing the power system operation against false data injection attacks. The proposed approach is compared with the existing methodologies in the literature and validated using standard IEEE test cases.