ChainTwin: Blockchain-Based Trustless Digital Twin Generation and Cross-Domain Adoption
Yinfeng Cao, Jiannong Cao, Baoxia Du, Dongbin Bai, Mingjin Zhang, Ruidong Li · IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering · 2025
Digital Twin (DT) creates virtual replicas of physical objects and systems for cost-efficient simulation and prediction applications in virtual space. In DT systems, ensuring consistency between physical objects and corresponding digital twins during both generation and adoption in applications is an essential requirement for high-fidelity modeling. However, existing solutions typically rely on centralized parties, which lack verification mechanisms or suffer from trust issues, thus being vulnerable to manipulation attacks in practice. Decentralized blockchain-based DT approaches often fail to verify the authenticity of physical object states, which likewise limits their practical effectiveness. To solve this digital twin consistency problem, this paper presents ChainTwin, a trustless blockchain-based framework for consistent DT generation and cross-domain adoption. With ChainTwin, a novel Digital Twin Generation Machine (DTVM) is designed to produce verifiable cryptographic proofs, and a two-dimensional selective verification mechanism is employed to efficiently cross-validate generation results. Additionally, ChainTwin achieves end-to-end consistency guarantees across the entire DT lifecycle through a lightweight cross-domain verification protocol. Experimental results from our PolyWorld prototype demonstrate ChainTwin's practicality, indicating a low-latency verification process in bandwidth-constrained environments. Security analysis confirms that ChainTwin maintains consistency guarantees under Byzantine adversarial assumptions.