Cyber security recommendations for wide area monitoring, protection, and control systems

Synchrophasor systems are being added to modern power systems to facilitate improved wide area monitoring and wide area protection schemes. As synchrophasor systems are installed utilities must decide if new cyber devices, phasor measurement units and phasor data concentrators, will be declared as The US National Electric Reliability Council (NERC) Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) cyber critical assets. This paper explores the potential impact of reconnaissance attacks, packet injection attacks, and denial of service attacks on wide area monitoring systems and wide area protection systems. This paper was written to accompany a panel presentation and discussion and was not intended to provide new research results.