Vulnerability Analysis of Smart Grids to GPS Spoofing
This addresses security vulnerabilities in smart grid infrastructure for operators, but it is incremental as it builds on existing state estimation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of GPS spoofing attacks on smart grids, which can alter sensor measurements and mislead control actions, by developing optimization and algorithms to identify vulnerable sensors and jointly estimate states and reconstruct attacks, with validation on IEEE benchmark networks.
Sensors such as phasor measurement units (PMUs) endowed with GPS receivers are ubiquitously installed providing real-time grid visibility. A number of PMUs can cooperatively enable state estimation routines. However, GPS spoofing attacks can notably alter the PMU measurements, mislead the network operator, and drastically impact subsequent corrective control actions. Leveraging a novel measurement model that explicitly accounts for the GPS spoofing attacks, this paper formulates an optimization problem to identify the most vulnerable PMUs in the network. A greedy algorithm is developed to solve the aforementioned problem. Furthermore, the paper develops a computationally efficient alternating minimization algorithm for joint state estimation and attack reconstruction. Numerical tests on IEEE benchmark networks validate the developed methods.