A Testbed for Studying Security in Synchrophasor-Based State Estimation of Electric Power Transmission Grid

In power grids, since the synchrophasor measurement protocol lacks a built-in encryption mechanism, measurement data transmission and communication are vulnerable to false data injection attacks (FDIA) that can cause the state estimation (SE) results to deviate from the ground truth. The existing test environments are insufficient to validate the consequences of the vulnerability. Therefore, this paper proposes building a testbed based on a real-time digital simulator to reproduce SE process with synchrophasor data for the grid. The testbed encompasses multiple remote terminal units and phasor measurement units data transmission to the substation in the IEEE C37.118 or Modbus protocol. Based on these synchrophasors and other measurement information like voltage and power flow, nonlinear SE results are calculated satisfying physical laws including power flow balance and Kirchhoff laws. Honest Gauss Newton method is utilized to achieve more accurate state estimation outcomes, with the objective of minimizing the sum of squared error between measurement data and the estimated value. Finally, several stealthy FDIA experiments are conducted on this testbed considering the security issues of the data transmission protocol. The results show that these attacks can successfully bypass the residue-based bad data detection and falsify the grid states, leading to uneconomic and even insecure grid control and dispatch decisions.