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M. Eckhart, A. Ekelhart, E. Weippl:
"Enhancing Cyber Situational Awareness for Cyber-Physical Systems through Digital Twins";
Talk: 24th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA 2019), Zaragoza, Spain; 2019-09-10 - 2019-09-13; in: "Proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA 2019)", IEEE, (2019), ISBN: 978-1-7281-0304-4; 1222 - 1225.

Operators of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) need to
maintain awareness of the cyber situation in order to be able
to adequately address potential issues in a timely manner. For
instance, detecting early symptoms of cyber attacks may speed
up the incident response process and mitigate consequences of
attacks (e.g., business interruption, safety hazards). However,
attaining a full understanding of the cyber situation may be
challenging, given the complexity of CPSs and the ever-changing
threat landscape. In particular, CPSs typically need to be
continuously operational, may be sensitive to active scanning,
and often provide only limited in-depth analysis capabilities. To
address these challenges, we propose to utilize the concept of
digital twins for enhancing cyber situational awareness. Digital
twins, i.e., virtual replicas of systems, can run in parallel to
their physical counterparts and allow deep inspection of their
behavior without the risk of disrupting operational technology
services. This paper reports our work in progress to develop a
cyber situational awareness framework based on digital twins
that provides a profound, holistic, and current view on the
cyber situation that CPSs are in. More specifically, we present
a prototype that provides real-time visualization features (i.e.,
system topology, program variables of devices) and enables a
thorough, repeatable investigation process on a logic and network
level. A brief explanation of technological use cases and outlook
on future development efforts completes this work.

Digital twins, cyber situational awareness, information security, cyber-physical systems, cyber defense

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ETFA.2019.8869197