Digital twins as a security risk?

Abstract

Digital twins have become a popular and widely used tool for assessing risk and resilience, particularly as they have increased in the fidelity and accuracy of their representation of real-world systems. Although digital twins provide the ability to experiment on and assess risks to and from a system without damaging the real-world system, they pose potentially significant security risks. For example, if a digital twin of a power system has sufficient accuracy to allow loss of electrical power service due to a natural hazard to be estimated at the address level with a high degree of accuracy, what prevents someone wishing to lead to disruption at this same building from using the model to solve the inverse problem to determine which parts of the power system should be attacked to maximize the likelihood of loss of service to the target facility? This perspective article discusses the benefits and risks of digital twins and argues that more attention needs to be paid to the risks posed by digital twins.