Probing the telltale physics: Towards a cyber-physical protocol to mitigate information corruption in smart grid systems

We consider a cyber-physical perspective to the problem of identifying and mitigating information corruption in smart grid systems. We study the problem of transient stability with distributed control using real-time data from geographically distributed phasor measurement units via a flocking-based modeling paradigm. We demonstrate how cyber corruption can be identified through the effective use of telltale physical couplings within the power system.We develop a novel witness-based cyber-physical protocol whereby physical coherence is leveraged to probe and identify phasor measurement unit data corruption and estimate the true information values for attack mitigation.