ELEGANT: Security of Critical Infrastructures With Digital Twins

The past years have witnessed an increasing interest and concern regarding the development of security monitoring management mechanisms for Critical Infrastructures, due to their vital role in ensuring availability many essential services. This task is not easy specific characteristics such systems, natural resistance Infrastructures operators against actions implying downtime. Digital Twins, as accurate virtual models physical objects or processes, can provide a faithful environment analysis evaluation potential mitigation strategies be deployed face situations. Nonetheless, on-premises deployment expensive, significant CAPEX whose return will depend on ability plan deploy suitable support infrastructure, well implementing efficient scalable data collection processing capable taking advantage acquired resources. paper presents off-premises approach design Twins secure critical infrastructures, developed scope ELEGANT project. Such are built using real-time, high fidelity replicas Programming Logic Controllers, coupled with supporting validation Machine Learning mitigate threats like Denial Service attacks. ELEGANT, which leveraged from capabilities Fed4Fire federated testbeds evaluated feasibility cloudified thus converting part projected in-premises model into on-demand, pay-as-you-go OPEX, eventually paving way establishment DTaaS (Digital Twin Service) paradigm. achieved results demonstrate that pipelines providing low impact terms resource usage Distributed attack scenarios, when higher volumes generated.