Co-Simulating Physical Processes and Network Data for High-Fidelity Cyber-Security Experiments

Summary

Recently, Digital Twin-based solutions have been proposed as experimentation platforms to study the behaviour of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) under attack, and design appropriate detection and mitigation measures. Existing solutions focus on physical process, control logic, or network communication simulation. Unfortunately, none of the Digital Twin solutions currently available provide a realistic and holistic solution to represent all three aspects. In this work, we propose the Digital HydrAuLic SIMulator (DHALSIM), a Digital Twin for water distribution systems that simulates physical, control, and network processes. DHALSIM builds on the integration of the Water Network Tool for Resilience (WNTR) hydraulic simulator and MiniCPS—an industrial network emulator—which are run in a co-simulation environment. Thanks to this integration, DHALSIM is able to simulate the hydraulic processes characterizing a water distribution system as well as full stack emulation of well-known industrial control protocols. The Digital Twin is demonstrated on the benchmark case study of C-Town, where we carry out a number of cyber-attack experiments. To our knowledge, DHALSIM is the first Digital Twin that implements a well known physics simulator with a virtual industrial logic and network emulation environment for water systems. DHALSIM is open source and available to the research community.