Digital Twin-Enhanced Incident Response for Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

Cyber-physical systems underpin many of our society’s critical infrastructures. Ensuring their cyber security is important and complex. A major activity in this regard is cyber security incident response, whose primary goal is to detect and mitigate cyber-attacks in order to ensure the continuity and resilience of services. For cyber-physical systems this is particularly challenging because it requires insights both from the cyber and physical (process) domains and the engagement of stakeholders that are not strictly concerned with cyber security. A technology that is receiving a lot of attention are digital twins – virtual representations of real-world (cyber-physical) systems. They can be used to support tasks such as estimating the state of a system and exploring the consequences of interventional activities (e.g., upgrades).