This letter proposes an application of the Benford’s law for the detection of cyber attacks in power system state estimators. Benford’s law, also known as 1st-digit law, states an unexpected property of the distribution of the first digit of certain sets of data, and has been found to apply to a surprisingly wide range of data domains. The first novel contribution of the letter is to show that the Benford’s law applies to power system data as well. A relevant property of this law is its high sensitivity to manipulations and, in fact, it is often utilized to detect frauds. Based on this feature, the second contribution of the letter is to utilize the Benford’s law to detect malicious data introduced by hackers in the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system of a transmission network. Tests based on power system models ranging from 9 to 21,177 buses show promising results.

中文翻译：

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通过本福德定律检测电力系统的网络攻击

这封信提出了本福德定律在电力系统状态估计器中检测网络攻击的应用。本福德定律，也称为一位数定律，陈述了某些数据集的第一位数的分布的意外性质，并且发现该定律适用于出乎意料的广泛数据域。这封信的第一个新颖贡献是表明本福德定律也适用于电力系统数据。该法律的一个相关属性是其对操纵的高度敏感性，实际上，它经常被用来检测欺诈行为。基于此功能，这封信的第二个贡献是利用本福德定律来检测黑客在传输网络的监控和数据采集（SCADA）系统中引入的恶意数据。