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

TL;DR

ByzTwin-Range introduces a dual-layer digital twin architecture for realistic testing and analysis of Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocols in cyber-physical systems, enhancing resilience and security.

Contribution

It presents a practical, industry-compatible cyber range that enables controlled Byzantine fault injection, stress testing, and vulnerability analysis using live operational data.

Findings

Identifies timing vulnerabilities and misconfigurations affecting BFT guarantees.

Enables continuous validation and adaptive hardening of CPS security.

Supports realistic stress testing with live data and fault injection.

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.