Toward a Unified Security Framework for Digital Twin Architectures

Digital Twins (DTs) stand as the most dominant representation of cyber-physical integration made possible through the advent of Industry 4.0. Their utilization is gaining precedence across various application domains for the implementation and analysis of complex systems. However, despite the numerous architectures proposed to develop and describe DTs setup in these applications, most of them fail to address the security and privacy challenges specific to each architecture. In this study, we examine a cross-platform DT reference architecture that adapts to various DT architectures in terms of functionality, reliability, and life cycle. We then explore the specific cybersecurity challenges of this reference architecture. As a result of our study, we propose a unified security framework that incorporates attack-defense layers and a model checker that scrutinizes various inputs from the DT architecture to assess its security and privacy. Finally, we present the security solutions that this framework can provide.