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M. Eckhart, A. Ekelhart:
"A Specification-based State Replication Approach for Digital Twins";
Talk: CPS-SPC '18, Toronto, Canada; 2018-10-19; in: "CPS-SPC '18", ACM, (2018), ISBN: 978-1-4503-5992-4; 36 - 47.

Digital twins play a key role in realizing the vision of a smart
factory. While this concept is often associated with maintenance,
optimization, and simulation, digital twins can also be leveraged to
enhance the security and safety of cyber-physical systems (CPSs).
In particular, digital twins can run in parallel to a CPS, allowing to
perform a security and safety analysis during operation without
the risk of disrupting live systems. However, replicating states of
physical devices within a CPS in functionally equivalent virtual
replicas, so that they precisely mirror the internal behavior of their
counterparts, is an open research topic. In this paper, we propose a
novel state replication approach that frst identifes stimuli based
on the system´s specifcation and then replicates them in a virtual
environment. We believe that replicating states of CPSs is a prerequisite for a multitude of security and safety enhancing features that
can be implemented on the basis of digital twins. To demonstrate
the feasibility of the specifcation-based state replication approach,
we provide a prototypical implementation and evaluate it in an
experimental CPS test bed. The results of this paper show that
attacks against CPSs can be successfully detected by leveraging the
proposed state replication approach

Cyber-physical systems; industrial control systems; digital twin; state replication; intrusion detection systems; AutomationML

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3264888.3264892