Impact of False Data Injection Attacks in Wide Area Damping Control

Abstract

Wide area measurement based damping controllers are used to mitigate the inter-area oscillations in a large geographically distributed power system. The performance of wide area damping control (WADC) heavily relies on cyber and physical infrastructure. As the measured input signals used in WADC are transferred to the controller location via a communication channel, it is prone to cyber-attacks. The attacker can inject malicious data into the WADC measurements and/or control signals. This paper focuses on modeling and analyzing the impact of different types of false data injection (FDI) attacks on the WADC control signals, namely, sinusoidal attack, triangular attack, saw-tooth attack, ramp attack, pulse attack, random attack, and replay attack. The control architecture for analyzing these attacks consists of power system stabilizers placed on each generator for damping of local modes and an $H_{2}/ H_{\infty} $ based WADC controller for damping of inter-area modes in Kundur’s 4-machine 2-area test system. Different types of attacks were compared for their severity, and it has been found that a sinusoidal attack has the highest severity of all the analyzed FDI attacks. The results obtained in this paper will be useful in implementing the cyber-attack detection and mitigation algorithms.