T2S2G: A Novel Two-Tier Secure Smart Grid Architecture to Protect Network Measurements

False data injection (FDI) attacks are a major security threat to smart grid (SG) communication systems. In FDI attacks, the attacker has the ability of modifying the measurements transmitted by smart grid entities such as smart meters, buses, etc. Many solutions have been proposed to mitigate FDI attacks in the SG. However, most of these solutions rely on centralized state estimation (SE), which is computationally expensive. To engulf this problem in FDI attack detection and to improve security of SGs, this paper proposes novel two-tier secure smart grid (T2S2G) architecture with distributed SE. In T2S2G, measurement collection and SE are involved in first tier while compromised meter detection is involved in second tier. Initially the overall SG system is divided into four sections by the weighted quad tree (WQT) method. Each section is provided with an aggregator, which is responsible to perform SE. Measurements from power grids are collected by remote terminal units (RTUs) and encrypted using a parallel enhanced elliptic curve cryptography (PEECC) algorithm. Then the measurements are transmitted to the corresponding aggregator. Upon collected measurements, aggregator estimates state using the amended particle swarm optimization (APSO) algorithm in a distributed manner. To verify authenticity of aggregators, each aggregator is authenticated by a logical schedule based authentication (LSA) scheme at the control server (CS). In the CS, fuzzy with a neural network (FNN) algorithm is employed for measurements classification. Our proposed T2S2G shows promising results in the following performance metrics: Estimation error, number of protected measurements, detection probability, successful detection rate, and detection delay.