Digital Twins

• Protect the DT against attacks: The research team has carried out several studies on the secure deployment of technology in critical domains and its access control, but also the design of an interconnection platform that allows secure and efficient communications between twins assuming the added difficulties and required by the new industrial paradigms like Industry 5.0. In particular, through SEGRES, NICS Lab has been involved in secure access between DT-based communities, facilitating the federation between systems via their respective DTs as well as the exchange of data to improve the transfer of digital models and intelligence between communities.

Access control is certainly relevant today, and is also reflected in the analytical studies carried out within Digital Aero. In this project, NICS Lab has contributed to the extraction of relevant security requirements, but also to the specification of tests to validate the security of the DT proposed within Digital Aero with application in aeronautical manufacturing systems. However, all of these analyses take a much more pragmatic view in SecTwin 5.0, where a set of security components are designed to be integrated into a common platform, which aims to interconnect twins without discarding the Industry 5.0 human-centricity and sustainability.

• Protect infrastructures through DTs: Here, NICS Lab models and experiments with some practical simulation-based approaches in order to demonstrate the actual utility of DT technology for situational awareness and resilience – both priority areas for active cyber defence. In AIAS, NICS Lab aims to demonstrate how simulation-based deception can be relevant for proactive defence, which can be supported by other related technologies such as virtual personas and high-interaction honeypots. The same is true for SecTwin 5.0, but concentrating the deception on a virtual copy of the interconnection platform, through which it is possible to validate security functions of each integrated component and their validity for defensive measures. This way of attracting attacks and learning from exploits, is also considered by OPTIMA-DONES where NICS Lab is responsible for automating, retraining and improving security automatic learning under deception and federation approaches.

The knowledge acquired is undoubtedly essential for improving all those monitoring and detection processes, useful for situational awareness and relevant to intensify cyber defense. This is the case of 5G+TACTILE and SADECEI-4.0, which have already demonstrated the effectiveness of simulation as a complementary tool to traditional detection systems to increase knowledge and anticipate appropriate responses. Preventive and corrective measures also contribute to mitigate the effects of possible attacks in real time and, consequently, to guarantee business continuity. Therefore, another major challenge for NICS Lab is also to explore the novelty of the ‘zero-touch’ response, both from a theoretical (5G+TACTILE) and practical perspective (SecTwin 5.0, OPTIMA-DONES).

NICS Lab’s involvement in these projects has enabled the deployment of DTs connected to industrial models within our own facilities. Among the models we highlight the deployment of an IIoT system, and the deployment of a simulated manufacturing line with connection to mock-ups and real cyber-physical systems, such as robots and controllers, all working together to represent the real world through 2D and 3D models. As it is evident, these realistic representations also enable the research team to meet new research challenges. In the field of cybersecurity, NICS Lab works on DT-assisted prediction and detection ^[1], where DT-supported detection should complement traditional detection processes (signature-based or anomaly-based) by considering all those anomalous states related to the functional processes of the operating systems themselves. This, in turn, adds value to the detection by allowing organisations not only to explore the anomalous conditions of their own technologies (IT/OT), but also to examine the functional processes of these technologies through simulation.

This type of protection requires addressing other integration issues to ensure a “comprehensive” protection with dynamic and valid access control policies ^[2] and “real-time” resilience through a suitable synchronisation of physical and digital spaces. Synchronisation is certainly a key process to maintain the security of the physical environment through the DT, but also the security of the DT itself if an acceptable level of protection and resilience must be ensured. DTs contain all the intellectual property of the physical environment they emulate and represent. Any threat posed to the technology, including its underlying infrastructures (edge/cloud, virtualisation systems) and digital models (related to AI/ML, CAD, mathematical formulations, graphics, etc.), may pose a serious impact to the physical environment, end-users, organisation(s) and the entire value chain ^[3].  

Due to this, all our efforts have been more focused on the insistent search for new and emerging technologies that, integrated with DT, can help to: (i) promote secure agile communication in DT-based environments, such as 6G, and render complex digital models through specialized computing infrastructures (edge-cloud) that, in turn, ensure context awareness and IA federation ^[4]; (ii) manage vulnerabilities to create dependable simulations, free of errors and uncertainty states ^[5]; and (iii) boost DT federation to create communities and consolidate cyber threat intelligence ^[6]. In this endeavour, we also advocate the idea of relying on specific standards for DTs. While it is true that some standards already exist with some initial security considerations, they are still insufficient to refocus all the needs mentioned above. In fact, in [7] we identified the most relevant standards on DTs and their security measures, and highlighted the priority of going deeper into the topic to find the best way to design useful DT-based approaches, which can also be beneficial for security of the future.

Moreover, the experience gained has crossed some frontiers that go beyond research, involving technological transfer. One of the NICS Lab members is currently Vice-Chair of the IEEE SIG ComSoc on Green Digital Twin Network, and has intensively cooperated with multiple entities and ECSO to produce the ECSO Technical Document on “Cybersecurity Scenarios and Digital Twins” in 2023, in addition to disseminating the use of DT for the protection of critical systems in multiple conferences (e.g., ICICS’24, ICISSP’24, RECSI’24, CPSS’23, ICCSA’22, CPS4CIP’20), webminars (e.g., ECCO) and summer schools (e.g., FOSAD’24, IPICS’23).