ACDT-IT: An Architecture of Adaptive Cognitive Digital Twins for Resilient IT Infrastructures and Services

The problem of assuring cybersecurity and resilience of IT infrastructures and services has been challenging both the research community and practitioners for decades. Despite the joint effort by the industry, academia, and government, the society has been constantly suffering from cyber breaches and incidents. This prompts the following research question: What would be a new kind of cybersecurity architecture that can potentially enhance the cybersecurity and resilience of IT infrastructures and services? This paper explores a novel architecture as well as the associated mechanisms that can be incorporated into the architecture to lead to resilient IT infrastructures and services. The innovation of the proposed architecture includes: (i) it is based on the core concept of Digital Twins, which, to our knowledge, has not been systematically explored in the context of IT cybersecurity; (ii) it is mapped to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 functions, which is deemed important because practitioners often use CSF 2.0 to guide their cyber defense practice; (iii) the architecture offers a seven-layer design, which builds on top of the existing IT cybersecurity mechanisms, such as intrusion detection, firewalls, and cryptographic solutions, and emerging techniques such as zero-trust.