Title: Are Digital Twins a Double-Edge Sword? A Perspective of (In)Security

Abstract:Digital Twin (DT) is the virtual replica of a physical entity (object, process, product, and or environment) that constantly interacts with the physical counterpart for a variety of purposes such as, but not limited to, simulation, replication, and predictive maintenance. DTs are poised to bring a revolutionarity change in the industry through innovation, increased productivity, resilience, scalability, and customer trust. The cornerstone of the DT is the data and knowledge transfer from the physical space to the virtual space (twin) and from the virtual space (twin) to the physical space, respectively. The existing DT research largely assumes that the exchanged data and knowledge are healthy.
To this end, the current pursuit in the DTs development has not taken a critical dimension into account, i.e., security. Without considering this dimension, a small glitch in the parameters exchanged in the DT environment (for instance for automatic predictive maintenance in the industry) could have catastrophic consequences. Therefore, it is imperative to rethink the security dimension of DTs.
In this seminar, we will cover two broader aspects of DTs, i) security of DTs, and ii) security through DTs. First, we will cover how secure (or insecure) DTs can be? How data security and trust can affect the overall functionality of DTs? Secondly, we will talk about leveraging DTs for not only traditional aforementioned objectives, but also for strengthening system security through threat intelligence, penetration testing, and so on.

Bio: Rasheed Hussain is a Senior Lecturer with the Smart Internet Lab and Bristol Digital Futures Institute (BDFI), Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Bristol, UK. He received his B.S. Engineering degree in Computer Software Engineering from University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan in 2007, MS and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from Hanyang University, South Korea in 2010 and 2015, respectively. He worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Hanyang University, South Korea from March 2015 to August 2015. He also worked as a guest researcher and consultant at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), The Netherlands from September 2015 till May 2016 and as Assistant Professor at Innopolis University, Innopolis, Russia from June 2016 until December 2018. He also worked as an Associate Professor and the Director of the Institute of Information Security and Cyber-Physical Systems as well as the head of Networks and Blockchain Lab at Innopolis University, Russia from December 2018 till December 2021.

He is a senior member of IEEE, member ACM, and serves as an editorial board member for various journals including IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, IEEE Access, IEEE Internet Initiative, Internet Technology Letters, Wiley, and serves as a reviewer for most of the IEEE transactions, Springer and Elsevier Journals. His research interests include Information Security and Privacy and particularly security and privacy issues in Vehicular Ad Hoc NETworks (VANETs), vehicular clouds, and vehicular social networking, applied cryptography, Internet of Things, Content-Centric Networking (CCN), API security, and blockchain. Currently, he is working on the Digital Twins (DTs) security, machine and deep learning for IoT security, blockchain security, Software-Defined Network (SDN) security, eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), and fairness in AI.