In the power grid, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are used for executing various applications for monitoring and controlling purposes, which in turn enable stable operation of the grid. The integrity and timely delivery of SCADA data is critical to the operation of the grid and this makes them an attractive target for cyber-attacks. However, SCADA systems have various vulnerabilities which may be exploited to launch attacks, leading to a number of security challenges. To address one of these security challenges, this paper proposes a technique for detecting data manipulation attacks on SCADA systems. The proposed methodology is based on utilizing synchrophasor measurements from Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) that are increasingly being deployed in power grids. The proposed method exploits the correlation between SCADA and PMU data, and the classification of tampered and real data is done through a difference measure developed in this paper. Simulations performed on real grid data show that the detection technique is highly effective at attack detection.
['Seemita Pal', 'Biplab Sikdar', 'Joe H. Chow']
Detecting data integrity attacks on SCADA systems using limited PMUs