A Comprehensive Survey on Digital Twin: Focusing on Security Threats and Requirements

Digital Twin (DT) aims to seamlessly replicate physical objects or processes in virtual environments, garnering attention for supporting diverse intelligent management services such as monitoring, analysis, and control. Integration with technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), big data, edge computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT) has propelled the development of DTs. However, the DT may not only introduce new potential security flaws but also inherit existing vulnerabilities from the technologies they incorporate and interact with due to their integration with diverse technologies. Despite its growing impact, research addressing the security concerns of DTs remains insufficient and still in its early stages. In this article, we provide a comprehensive and in-depth review of the current state of DTs, focusing on their security aspects. We first depict an overview of DTs, including the definition of the DT and various DT applications, and then present the architecture for DTs. Subsequently, we conduct a detailed examination of security attacks and threats across the functional layers of the DT architecture. In contrast to the previous surveys on DTs, we derive security properties and security functional requirements (SFRs) based on the Common Criteria (CC) standard for mitigating these attacks and threats. We also introduce technologies that enable the achievement of SFRs with a future research perspective. By addressing these critical security aspects, our article enhances the security and trustworthiness of DTs, contributing to their safe and reliable deployment in various domains.