Scalable cyber-physical testbed for cybersecurity evaluation of synchrophasors in power systems

Abstract

This paper presents a synchrophasor-based real-time cyber-physical power system testbed with a novel security evaluation tool, pySynphasor, that can emulate different real attack scenarios on the phasor measurement unit (PMU). The testbed focuses on real-time cyber-security emulation using different components, including a real-time digital simulator, virtual machines (VM), a communication network emulator, and a packet manipulation tool. The script-based VM deployment and software-defined network emulation facilitate a highly scalable cyber-physical testbed, which enables emulations of a real power system under different attack scenarios such as address resolution protocol (ARP) poisoning attack, man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, false data injection attack (FDIA), and eavesdropping attack. An open-source pySynphasor module has been implemented to analyse the security vulnerabilities of the IEEE C37.118.2 protocol. The paper also presents an interactive framework for injecting false data into a realistic system utilising the pySynphasor module, which can dissect and reconstruct the C37.118.2 packets. Therefore, it expands the potential of testing and developing PMU-based systems and analysing their security vulnerabilities, benefiting the power industry and academia. A case study demonstrating the FDIA attack on the PMU measurements and the bad-data detection technique is presented as an example of the testbed capability.