An effective countermeasure against traffic analysis attacks in wide area measurement systems

There has been a surge of interest in adopting wide area measurement systems for the electrical grid due to their ability to provide an online, coordinated and dynamic image of the entire network. Security is an indispensable concern for these systems as a single breach may endanger the normal operation of the entire system. As such, providing approaches that overcome the vulnerabilities of these systems is important. This paper proposes an approach to combat particularly severe attacks (called traffic analysis attacks). A priority-based approach is introduced which obfuscates the traffic pattern of measurement data and also guarantees the timeliness of data. The simulation results verify the applicability and performance of the proposed approach.