Distributed Framework for Detecting PMU Data Manipulation Attacks With Deep Autoencoders

Phasor measurement unit (PMU) data manipulation attacks (PDMAs) may blind the control centers to the real-time operating conditions of power systems. Detecting these attacks accurately is essential to ensure the normal operation of power system monitoring and control. Using long-term accumulated historical PMU measurements to train a machine learning model to detect PDMAs has shown promising results. In this paper, deep-autoencoder-based anomaly measurers are deployed throughout the power system to build a distributed PDMA detection framework. The architecture of a deep autoencoder and its training process are introduced. How to convert the historical PMU measurements into data samples for learning is also elaborated upon. Once trained, an anomaly measurer can assess the PDMA existence possibility of the new PMU measurements. By integrating the results of different anomaly measurers, the proposed distributed PDMA detection framework can detect PDMAs in the whole power system. The effectiveness and detection performance of the framework are discussed through experiments.