(POSTER) SmartTwins: Secure and Auditable DLT-based Digital Twins for the WoT

Abstract

Digital Twins and the Internet of Things (IoT) are two of the most prominent recent concepts and technologies. The IoT supports many applications that merge the physical with the cyber world. This highlights the need for improved security. Here, we argue that digital twins can help in securing and strengthening the IoT by using them for interacting with the actual IoT devices. While most digital twins implementations are centralized, we propose to integrate Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) and digital twins into the IoT to realize decentralized, secure, available, flexible, and auditable blockchain-based IoT services for IoT devices that follow the W3C Web of Things (WoT) standards. In this work, we present the design of SmartTwin, a blockchain-based digital twin framework for which we provide two different implementations using two different blockchains, we present the design trade-offs, and we discuss future research and development directions.