Time Synchronization Attack in Smart Grid-Part I: Impact and Analysis
This addresses a critical security problem for smart grid infrastructure, which relies on precise timing for essential functions, and is incremental in applying known spoofing techniques to new grid applications.
The paper tackles the vulnerability of smart grid operations to GPS spoofing by proposing a Time Synchronization Attack (TSA), demonstrating its effectiveness in disrupting fault detection, voltage stability monitoring, and event locationing through numerical simulations.
Many operations in power grids, such as fault detection and event location estimation, depend on precise timing information. In this paper, a novel Time Synchronization Attack (TSA) is proposed to attack the timing information in smart grid. Since many applications in smart grid utilize synchronous measurements and most of the measurement devices are equipped with global positioning system (GPS) for precise timing, it is highly probable to attack the measurement system by spoofing the GPS. The effectiveness of TSA is demonstrated for three applications of phasor measurement unit (PMU) in smart grid, namely transmission line fault detection, voltage stability monitoring and event locationing. The validity of TSA is demonstrated by numerical simulations.