Security Orchestration with Explainability for Digital Twins-based Smart Systems

Abstract

The Digital Twin (DT) paradigm has been largely adopted for many smart systems in various domains. Due to the heterogeneous and distributed nature of the physical twins, these systems increasingly incorporate disparate security tools, especially those based on service-based AI/ML capabilities. That presents numerous challenges in achieving a comprehensive understanding of security analytics and explainability in security operations carried out by ML-based security services, which require continuous monitoring and optimization to remain effective. This paper aims to support security service integration and automated analyses with enhanced explainability in DTs. We introduce a novel framework that unifies runtime contexts to facilitate security services unification and operation interpretation in security orchestration. We define a workflow and provide necessary services for generating security reports across physical and logical layers. Leveraging a centralized knowledge service, we let security analysts incorporate domain knowledge in automating incident reasoning and security enforcement at the logical layer. We demonstrate our explainability framework on a DT of an Industry 4.0 toy factory with two ML-based security services detecting network anomalies. Our experiments show a significant reduction in manual effort for orchestrating security incident analysis and mitigation.