Impacts of Bad Data on the PMU based Line Outage Detection

An increasing number of Phasor Measurement Unit(PMU) have been deployed in power grids to increase the observability. Recent studies have shown that PMU data can be used to detect the outage of lines. On the other side, modern power system becomes more prone to cyber attacks due to the highly integration of information technology and communication network. In this paper, we demonstrated that an attacker can mask the outage of a single line by attacking a set of critical measurements. A mixed integer linear programming model is proposed to minimize the number of attacked measurements. The IEEE 39-bus system is used to demonstrate the masking scheme.