Enhancing information security of renewable smart grids by utilizing an integrated online-offline framework

Renewable energies are extensively utilized in smart grids. Due to the widespread use of information and communication technologies in such networks, their security has become a critical issue. This paper aims to enhance the information security of renewable smart grids under cyber-physical attacks. In this regard, it is assumed that the non-legitimate agents manipulate the data of solar and wind sensors to deteriorate the safe operation. Here, a stochastic real-time procedure based on the observation-action method is utilized to simulate the behavior of attackers. Then, to improve the security and mitigate the impact of such a vulnerability, an integrated framework composed of offline and online units is designed. To construct the offline framework, a data mining process including k-nearest neighbour and support vector machine algorithms is implemented based on real historical data. Furthermore, the online framework tracks the real-time data according to a sensor pre-secured by a firewall. The results show that the proposed framework is capable to relieve the influence of cyber-physical attacks where at least 79% of success rate will be achievable under simultaneous false data injection attacks.