A digital twin and deep-learning ensemble for cyber attack detection in industrial control systems at the IoT edge

Abstract

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) face escalating cyber threats as adversaries increasingly exploit artificial intelligence (AI) to evade conventional defenses. This paper introduces a Digital Twin-enhanced security framework in which a real-time, physics-consistent virtual replica of the controlled industrial process is synchronized with sensor and actuator telemetry from the physical plant and used to validate, suppress, or confirm anomaly scores produced by a deep-learning ensemble. The physical twin is the closed-loop ICS plant (water treatment, water distribution, or chemical process); the Digital Twin is a state-space process model coupled to an Extended Kalman Filter that predicts the next sensor measurement and emits a residual whenever the observation deviates from the physics-consistent prediction. The detection layer combines this Digital-Twin residual signal with a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) autoencoder, an attention-based transformer, and an Isolation Forest, fused through a calibrated weighted score that is gated by the residual, so that purely data-driven anomalies that do not violate physics are downweighted and stealthy attacks that violate physics are escalated. Evaluated on three benchmark datasets (Secure Water Treatment testbed [SWaT], Water Distribution [WADI], and Tennessee Eastman) comprising 56 attack scenarios, the framework achieves 97.6% precision, 96.2% recall, an F1-score of 96.9%, and sub-50 ms inference latency. This corresponds to a 3.2 percentage-point F1-score improvement over the strongest baseline (transformer at 93.7%) and a roughly 50% reduction in residual error. Interpretability is supported through attention visualization and Digital-Twin residual analysis, enabling operators to validate detection outcomes. With native Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) integration, Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus for distributed deployments, and formal verification of safety properties, the framework supports deployment-oriented protection for critical infrastructure aligned with International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 62443-4-2 requirements.