Collaborative defense against data injection attack in IEC61850 based smart substations

Abstract

As the power distribution grid moves towards actualizing the concept of a smart grid, the dependence of reliable and secure grid operation on the communication architecture and data is increasing rapidly, along with the possible cyber-attack surface. In this paper first an agreement algorithm for a distribution substation with radial topology is presented that leverages the communication capabilities under the IEC61850 standard, along with basic power system concepts such as Kirchhoff's laws, to detect and locate a data injection attack in the communication system, a relay misconfiguration or a sensor failure that can cause an incorrect response to actual or apparent fault currents. Then a setup for a collaborative mechanism using the algorithm to detect and deter the impacts of such a data injection attack under different grid operating scenarios is introduced. The results of the demonstration of this setup, presented here, show that the proposed collaborative mechanism is consistently able to detect and deter the impacts of data injection and misconfiguration attacks as well as sensor failures in the IEC61850-based smart substation.