# A Survey on Digital Twins: Architecture, Enabling Technologies, Security and Privacy, and Future Prospects

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13350 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13350/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jan 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [A Survey on ChatGPT: AI-Generated Contents, Challenges, and Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18339/) (2023)
- [Internet of Agents: Fundamentals, Applications, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07176/) (2025)
- [Large Model Based Agents: State-of-the-Art, Cooperation Paradigms, Security and Privacy, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14457/) (2024)
- [A Review of Digital Twins and their Application in Cybersecurity based on Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01154/) (2023)
- [A New Era of Mobility: Exploring Digital Twin Applications in Autonomous Vehicular Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16158/) (2023)
- [Multi-attribute Auction-based Resource Allocation for Twins Migration in Vehicular Metaverses: A GPT-based DRL Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05418/) (2024)
- [LLM-Twin: Mini-Giant Model-driven Beyond 5G Digital Twin Networking Framework with Semantic Secure Communication and Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10631/) (2023)
- [Blockchain-based Pseudonym Management for Vehicle Twin Migrations in Vehicular Edge Metaverse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15285/) (2024)
- [Digital Twin in Industries: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00209/) (2024)
- [Two-Timescale Synchronization and Migration for Digital Twin Networks: A Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01092/) (2024)
- [Does Twinning Vehicular Networks Enhance Their Performance in Dense Areas?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10701/) (2024)
- [CIG-MAE: Cross-Modal Information-Guided Masked Autoencoder for Self-Supervised WiFi Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04723/) (2025)
- [The Role and Applications of Airport Digital Twin in Cyberattack Protection during the Generative AI Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05248/) (2024)
- [Artificial Intelligence for Modeling & Simulation in Digital Twins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19390/) (2026)
- [A Coupled Physics-Informed Neural Network for Greenhouse Climate State Reconstruction and Parameter Identification under Sparse Sensor Measurements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02524/) (2026)
- [From Prompt to Service: An SLM-Based Agent Orchestration Gateway for AI-Driven Virtual Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03557/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

By interacting, synchronizing, and cooperating with its physical counterpart in real time, digital twin is promised to promote an intelligent, predictive, and optimized modern city. Via interconnecting massive physical entities and their virtual twins with inter-twin and intra-twin communications, the Internet of digital twins (IoDT) enables free data exchange, dynamic mission cooperation, and efficient information aggregation for composite insights across vast physical/virtual entities. However, as IoDT incorporates various cutting-edge technologies to spawn the new ecology, severe known/unknown security flaws and privacy invasions of IoDT hinders its wide deployment. Besides, the intrinsic characteristics of IoDT such as decentralized structure, information-centric routing and semantic communications entail critical challenges for security service provisioning in IoDT. To this end, this paper presents an in-depth review of the IoDT with respect to system architecture, enabling technologies, and security/privacy issues. Specifically, we first explore a novel distributed IoDT architecture with cyber-physical interactions and discuss its key characteristics and communication modes. Afterward, we investigate the taxonomy of security and privacy threats in IoDT, discuss the key research challenges, and review the state-of-the-art defense approaches. Finally, we point out the new trends and open research directions related to IoDT.