TwinPot: Digital Twin-assisted Honeypot for Cyber-Secure Smart Seaports

Yigit, Yagmur; Kinaci, Omer Kemal; Duong, Trung Q; Canberk, Berk

Abstract

The idea of next-generation ports has become more apparent in the last ten years-in response to the challenge posed by the rising demand for efficiency and the ever-increasing volume of goods. In this new era of intelligent infrastructure and facilities, it is evident that cyber-security has recently received the most significant attention from the seaport and maritime authorities, and it is a primary concern on the agenda of most ports. Traditional security solutions like firewalls and antivirus software can be applied to safeguard IoT and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) from harmful entities. Nevertheless, security researchers can only watch, examine, and learn about the behaviors of attackers if these solutions operate more transparently. Herein, honeypots are potential solutions since they offer valuable information about the attackers. Honeypots can be virtual or physical. Virtual honeypots must be more realistic to entice attackers, necessitating better high-fidelity. To this end, Digital Twin (DT) technology can be employed to increase the complexity and simulation fidelity of the honeypots. Seaports can be attacked from both their existing devices and external devices at the same time. Existing intrusion detection mechanisms are insufficient to detect external attacks; therefore, the current systems cannot handle attacks at the desired level. DT and honeypot technologies can be used together to tackle them. Consequently, we suggest a DT-assisted honeypot, called TwinPot, for external attacks in smart seaports. Moreover, we propose an intelligent attack detection mechanism to handle different attack types using DT technology for internal attacks. Finally, we build an extensive smart seaport dataset for internal and external attacks using the MANSIM tool and two existing datasets to test the performance of our system. We show that under both simultaneous internal and external attacks on the system, our solution successfully detects internal and external attacks.

Citation

Yigit, Y., Kinaci, O. K., Duong, T. Q., & Canberk, B. (2023, May). TwinPot: Digital Twin-assisted Honeypot for Cyber-Secure Smart Seaports. Presented at 2023 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC Workshops), Rome, Italy

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 2023 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC Workshops)
• Start Date: May 28, 2023
• End Date: Jun 1, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Oct 23, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023
• Deposit Date: Oct 11, 2024
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 740-745
• Series ISSN: 2694-2941
• Book Title: 2023 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC Workshops)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/iccworkshops57953.2023.10283756
• Keywords: Index Terms-IoT; DT; Seaport; Smart Ports; Honeypot