GPS spoofing‐based time synchronisation attack in advanced metering infrastructure and its protection

Abstract

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) plays a key role in power systems. Since smart meters and meter collectors are synchronised to the time synchronisation devices (TSDs) in the head end system (HES) of AMI, they are vulnerable to global positioning system (GPS) spoofing-based time synchronisation attack (TSA). Impacts of GPS spoofing-based TSA on AMI are investigated in this study. It is uncovered that, since AMI is a distributed networked system and metering data and control commands transmitted in AMI could be of large latency, data and commands with large latency over the specific threshold are considered to be invalid according to validity verification mechanism of average distributed system. Therefore, the disorder in time synchronisation induced by GPS spoofing-based TSA could disable functions of HES of AMI, such as meter reading and remote control. A time jitter detection-based approach is developed to identify and prevent from GPS spoofing-based TSA. A high-precision oven-controlled crystal oscillator with cumulative error compensation is utilised to identify time jitter of the satellite clock and help ride through sustained GPS spoofing-based TSA. Simulation on FPGA demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.