The Impact of GPS Vulnerabilities on the Electric Power Grid

Bernhard Baumgartner, Christian Riesch, Wolfgang Schenk

Abstract

The failure of time references can result in operational distortions of power plants or substations. Rumours say that simply a truck, illegally equipped with a GPS jammer to camouflage its position, parking outside a substation can cause GPS failure in the substation. Is this really true? How vulnerable are today's GPS synchronized time references? And what are the consequences of short term to long term GPS reception losses? In this paper the authors address these questions for different time synchronisation infrastructures and applications in the power industry. The paper concludes with an assessment of possible countermeasures against GPS Jamming and GPS Spoofing.

Keywords

Time Synchronisation, GPS Jamming, GPS Spoofing, GPS Time reference, Power

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IMEKO-TC4-2014-462.pdf

DOI

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IMEKO TC

TC4 - Measurement of Electrical Quantities

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