Certificate Management for Cloud-Hosted Digital Twins

A key enabler for the digitization of physical devices is digital twining technology. A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical object (or a collection of physical objects) that allows their integration into cyber systems. Digital twins are usually hosted in cloud environments, which provide high availability and resilience to failures. This integration creates new opportunities and enables new capabilities, but it also raises security concerns. In this paper, we design a digital certificate management solution that allows building trust on digital twins independently of their network location. Our solution allows digital twins to securely receive certificates, which can be used to digitally sign data at the application layer. Our scheme does not depend on the certificate infrastructure used to secure the communication between end-users and the (cloud-hosted) digital twins. Our solution is feasible, realistic and resilient against key breaches, with a marginal communication overhead. Finally, our scheme automates the process of certificate issuance for digital twins, thus enabling very fast key and certificate rotation.