Block-Phasor: A Decentralized Blockchain Framework to Enhance Security of Synchrophasor

The synchrophasor technology has been changing the wide-area monitoring system (WAMS) of power grids; as it facilitates real-time grid situational awareness, observability and state estimation, and online stability assessment. However, the measurement samples inside the substations, or in phasor data concentrators (PDCs) can become a target for cyber-attacks, such as false data injection and data tampering attacks. Moreover, the synchrophasors are vulnerable to a single point of failure. Blockchain, the main technology behind the bitcoin, can simultaneously ensure reliability, security, and integrity with decentralization properties in a peer-to-peer system. Therefore, to mitigate the issues in the synchrophasor network, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based synchrophasor network protection framework to enhance the self-defensive capability of its monitoring system. Our proposed model can mitigate data manipulation attacks from malicious entities by introducing bloom filter based fast phasor data identity validation, and Merkle tree-based fast data verification. Finally, the blockchain consensus can help to keep the consistency in the system and eliminate malicious entities from manipulating the overall security of the protection framework. Our experimental results show that the proposed system is scalable and fast in terms of synchrophasor data verification.