Using Digital Twins as an Upgrade Path for Critical Infrastructure Control Systems

The threats to critical infrastructure systems, such as power grid control systems, are increasing. Existing fault tolerance and security best practices are no longer enough and we will see more and more successful attacks. Prior works have shown how to build intrusion-tolerant systems, however, these system designs have not made it into practice because performing upgrades of critical infrastructure systems is difficult and costly, and operators typically prioritize stability and availability over resilience to emerging threats. Operators do not want to perform upgrades that may cause downtime, and they want to work with well established and tested systems. In this work, we present a new approach to this problem, using intrusion-tolerant digital twins as a path to disruption-free transition towards more resilient systems.