Digital Twins and Extended Reality for Tailoring Better Adapted Cybersecurity Trainings in Critical Infrastructures

Due to their value and interconnected role in our societies, critical infrastructures are vulnerable national assets increasingly becoming targets of cyber-attacks. Despite there being a multitude of training programs in cybersecurity offered, human errors are still accountable for a majority of breaches. As current training and awareness courses are insufficient to meet the current cybersecurity challenges in critical infrastructures, this paper examines how they could be improved with new solutions. In addition to current training programs lacking in effectively addressing human factors, identifying appropriate outcome and performance measures to assess the effectiveness of the program remains an issue. In order to address the uniqueness of an individual’s human factors and natural learning trajectory, the need for tailored training programs, to meet the demands of each user and influence a change in cyber-behavior, is proposed. These tailored training programs would be enhanced with the inclusion of training aids such as Digital Twins and Extended Reality. Indeed, recent works started to explore how combining Digital Twins and Augmented or Virtual reality could enhance learning in different contexts. We have studied how some human features could be replicated and used in the digital twin technologies (such as personality, attention, emotions or age and gender), as well as the human factors enhanced in the overall simulated virtual experience (embodiment, engagement, situational awareness, collaboration). However, there are still ongoing challenges and ethical concerns with such solutions. We conclude with a discussion of future directions.