Cyber physical security research for smart grid is currently one of the nation’s top R&D priorities. The existing vulnerabilities in the legacy grid infrastructure make it particularly susceptible to countless cyber-attacks. There is a growing emphasis towards building interconnected, sophisticated federated testbeds to perform realistic experiments by allowing the integration of geographically-dispersed resources in the dynamic cyber-physical environment. In this paper, we present a cyber (network) based federation testbed to validate the performance of an anomaly detector in context of a Wide Area Protection (WAP) security. Specifically, we have utilized the resources available at the Iowa State University Power Cyber (ISU PCL) Laboratory to emulate the substation and local center networks; and the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL); to emulate the regional control center network. Initially, we describe a hardware-in-the loop based experimental setup for implementing data integrity attacks on an IEEE 39 bus system. We then perform network packet analysis focusing on latency and bandwidth as well as evaluate the performance of a decision tree based anomaly detector in measuring its ability to identify different attacks. Our experimental results reveal the computed wide area network latency; bandwidth requirement for minimum packet loss; and successful performance of the anomaly detector. Our studies also highlight the conceptual architecture necessary for developing the federated testbed, inspired by the NASPI network.