Deriving a Cost-Effective Digital Twin of an ICS to Facilitate Security Evaluation

A Digital Twin Based Industrial Automation and Control System Security Architecture

“…The usage of digital twins for penetrations testing is discussed in a recent work by Bitton et al [9]. The author investigate the relation behind a penetration test specification and system realization with focus on system cost optimization.…”

“…Adversary models for digital twin systems have not been extensively treated in the literature as the concept mostly so far has been used for production optimization and not security. Certain security aspects regarding using digital twin as security enablers in IACS are considered in [10] and [9]. The authors in [10] consider state replication for active monitoring and intrusion detection while [9] consider the problem of penentration testing of IACS with focus on cost optimization for specific security penetration tests (performed on simulated or emulated digital twin or on an acutal physical component in the IACS).…”

“…Certain security aspects regarding using digital twin as security enablers in IACS are considered in [10] and [9]. The authors in [10] consider state replication for active monitoring and intrusion detection while [9] consider the problem of penentration testing of IACS with focus on cost optimization for specific security penetration tests (performed on simulated or emulated digital twin or on an acutal physical component in the IACS). However, since these works have very specific security functions goals, they lack adversary model definitions for the digital twin scenario we are considering.…”

“…This is an approach that is efficient if the main purpose of the design is to evaluate security breaches stemming from the physical domain. Instead, 7 Recall that in our adversary model we assume all inputs to a physical twin to be trustworthy and not subject to direct security analysis 8 https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/index.html#lang/en us 9 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/virtual-networksoverview we in our security architecture use the digital twin as a "guard" against all, potential hostile, external stimuli on the physical domain. Hence, even if demanding from real-time perspective, we instead have adopted a direct state replication or what the authors in [10] refers to as "active monitoring".…”

“…We tackle this general security issue in this paper by looking into the digital twin model as an enabler for enhanced security when opening up IACS low level control functions and data exchange according to the Industry 4.0 vision. Digital twins and state replication as security enablers were recently proposed by different researchers [9], [10], [11]. Previous works have not taken an IACS holistic view and in this paper we look into the problem from a system security point of view.…”