Cyber attack detection in renewable-rich IBR-dominated microgrids: A natural watermarking approach

This paper proposes a natural watermarking approach for detecting cyber attacks in a renewable-rich microgrid (MG). The approach leverages the inherent variability of renewable energy generation to watermark the measurements feeding inverter-based resources (IBRs), enabling the IBRs to locally detect attacks. It detects cyber attacks by checking the statistics of the natural watermark exhibited in IBR measurements. It is physically interpretable, computationally efficient, and scalable for large-scale MGs. Its effectiveness is validated through pure-software simulations and real-time controller hardware-in-the-loop experiments in a MG test system.