Assessment of System Reliability in Presence of Cyber Attack Risk on PMU Data

This paper provides an assessment of the effect of Synchrophasor Measurement Units in improving power system reliability. First, an overview of cyber threats to PMU networks is given where the possible vulnerabilities of the network to malicious data manipulation are studied. The addition of PMUs to the power system infrastructure would offer greater observability in the system and thus mitigate the risk of transmission line failure due to thermal overloading. However, the addition of PMUs opens the system to cyber threats that might, in fact, lower system reliability. The analysis in this work looks at the effect of these threats on the overall system reliability of a real system layout based on real PMU data obtained from a utility. The benefit to a utility in including PMUs under the varying levels of cyber threat is also studied.