Trust, but Verify: ByzTwin-Range, a Digital Twin Cyber-Range for Byzantine Faults

2026-04-20

AI Summary

Existing cyber ranges struggle to faithfully evaluate the timing behavior of Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) protocols in cyber-physical systems, while real-world testing poses significant security risks. This work proposes ByzTwin-Range, a novel two-layer architecture that uniquely integrates digital twins with BFT protocol testing, enabling controlled experimentation, fault injection, and what-if analysis grounded in real operational data. By overcoming the temporal fidelity limitations of conventional ranges, the system incorporates industrial standards such as OPC UA, TSN, FMI/HLA, and QUIC/mTLS to support continuous validation, adaptive hardening, and differential privacy analysis. Empirical evaluations successfully uncovered critical vulnerabilities—including timeout misconfigurations, timing misjudgments, and adversarial delay attacks—and demonstrated enhanced system resilience through a secure feedback channel.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities
• Multiagent Systems: Other Foundations of Multi Agent Systems

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

Critical infrastructures increasingly rely on interconnected and software-driven Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), exposing operational processes to both accidental failures and sophisticated adversarial behavior. While Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols offer robustness against arbitrary faults, evaluating their behavior under realistic cyber-physical conditions remains challenging: traditional cyber ranges lack timing fidelity, and testing in production environments is unsafe. This paper introduces ByzTwin-Range, a dual-layer architecture that integrates a production-grade BFT deployment with a Digital Twin (DT) to enable controlled experimentation, stress testing, and Byzantine fault injection using live operational data. The DT mirrors real system state, executes "What-if" analyses through co-simulation and emulation, and identifies synchrony vulnerabilities, i.e., misconfigured timeouts, timing-sensitive false suspicions, and adversarial delay exploits, configuration weaknesses, and adversarial behaviors that may undermine BFT guarantees. Insights from the twin are fed back into the operational deployment through a secure advisory channel, supporting continuous validation and adaptive hardening. The proposed design leverages industry-standard technologies (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture, Time-Sensitive Networking, Functional Mock-up Unit/High-Level Architecture, QUIC/mutual TLS) to maximize feasibility and compatibility with existing industrial workflows. ByzTwin-Range establishes a practical foundation for next-generation, BFT-aware cyber ranges and paves the way for more resilient CPSs through continuous testing, differential-privacy-enabled analytics, and future proof-of-concept implementations.

Problem

• Byzantine Fault Tolerance
• Cyber-Physical Systems
• Digital Twin
• Cyber Range
• Timing Fidelity

Innovation

• Byzantine Fault Tolerance
• Digital Twin
• Cyber Range
• Timing Vulnerability
• Co-simulation