Cyber-Resilient Digital Twins: Discriminating Attacks for Safe Critical Infrastructure Control

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 19 Mar 2026] Cyber-Resilient Digital Twins: Discriminating Attacks for Safe Critical Infrastructure Control Mohammadhossein Homaei, Iman Khazrak, Rubén Molano, Andrés Caro, Mar Ávila Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS) face growing threats from cyber-attacks that exploit sensor and control vulnerabilities. Digital Twin (DT) technology can detect anomalies via predictive modelling, but current methods cannot distinguish attack types and often rely on costly full-system shutdowns. This paper presents i-SDT (intelligent Self-Defending DT), combining hydraulically-regularized predictive modelling, multi-class attack discrimination, and adaptive resilient control. Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs) with differentiable conservation constraints capture nominal dynamics and improve robustness to adversarial manipulations. A recurrent residual encoder with Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) separates normal operation from single- and multi-stage attacks in latent space. When attacks are confirmed, Model Predictive Control (MPC) uses uncertainty-aware DT predictions to keep operations safe without shutdown. Evaluation on SWaT and WADI datasets shows major gains in detection accuracy, 44.1% fewer false alarms, and 56.3% lower operational costs in simulation-in-the-loop evaluation. with sub-second inference latency confirming real-time feasibility on plant-level workstations, i-SDT advances autonomous cyber-physical defense while maintaining operational resilience. Comments: 19 Pages, 2 Figures, 12 Tables Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Machine Learning (cs.LG) Cite as: arXiv:2603.18613 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.18613v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.18613 Focus to learn more Submission history From: MohammadHossein Homaei [view email] [v1] Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:33:21 UTC (174 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.LG References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)