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M. Eckhart, A. Ekelhart:
"Digital Twins for Cyber-Physical Systems Security: State of the Art and Outlook";
in: "Security and Quality in Cyber-Physical Systems Engineering", Springer International Publishing, Switzerland, 2019, ISBN: 978-3-030-25311-0, 383 - 412.

Digital twins refer to virtual replicas of physical objects that, inter alia,
enable to monitor, visualize, and predict states of cyber-physical systems (CPSs).
These capabilities yield efficiency gains and quality improvements in manufacturing
processes. In addition, the concept of digital twins can also be leveraged to advance
the security of the smart factory. More precisely, this concept can be applied as
early as in the design phase by providing engineers the means to spot security
flaws in the specification of the CPS. Security testing or intrusion detection are other
security-enhancingtechnical use cases of digital twins that can be realized in systems
engineering or during plant operation. In this chapter, we will discuss how digital
twins can accompany their physical counterparts throughout the entire lifecycle and
thereby strengthen the security of CPSs. The findings of this chapter indicate that the
concept of digital twins will open up new paths to secure CPSs. However, efficiently
creating, maintaining, and running digital twins still represents a major research
challenge, as the overhead costs hinder the adoption of this concept. We believe that
these insights are valuable to shape future research in this emerging research area at
the intersection of digital twins and information security.

Digital twin · Information security · Cyber-physical systems · Industrial control systems · Digital thread

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25312-7_14