Security and Privacy in Vehicular Digital Twin Networks: Challenges and Solutions

With the flourishing and advancement of autonomous vehicles, the vehicular digital twin (VDT) has become an emerging paradigm, consisting of inter-twin communication and intra-twin communication. VDT can effectively address the current shortcomings of the autonomous vehicle and provide enhanced and scalable services to the users. Nevertheless, strict security and privacy concerns arise, as VDT collects a wide range of privacy-sensitive information of the users in real-time and is exposed to an open network environment in both physical and virtual horizons. In this article, we investigate the security and privacy of VDT. We first describe the vehicular digital twin network architecture in detail and then investigate some VDT-related applications. After that, we discuss the security and privacy issues in VDT. Finally, we put forward several potential countermeasures and open research issues for VDT from the perspective of security and privacy. We expect this work will bring more attention to further investigation on security and privacy solutions for vehicular digital twin networks.