Time Stamp Attack on Wide Area Monitoring System in Smart Grid

Security becomes an extremely important issue in smart grid. To maintain the steady operation for smart power grid, massive measurement devices must be allocated widely among the power grid. Previous studies are focused on false data injection attack to the smart grid system. In practice, false data injection attack is not easy to implement, since it is not easy to hack the power grid data communication system. In this paper, we demonstrate that a novel time stamp attack is a practical and dangerous attack scheme for smart grid. Since most of measurement devices are equipped with global positioning system (GPS) to provide the time information of measurements, it is highly probable to attack the measurement system by spoofing the GPS. By employing the real measurement data in North American Power Grid, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the time stamp attack on smart grid.