A Reputation-Enhanced Shard-Based Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Scheme for Secure Data Sharing in Zero Trust Human Digital Twin Systems

Secure data sharing is imperative in human digital twin (HDT) systems due to the continuous communication requirements among physical and virtual twins, making data security and privacy essential concerns. Previous works have emphasized the significance of blockchain technology in mitigating security challenges within digital twin systems. Nevertheless, existing blockchain-based solutions often fall short of meeting the specific latency and throughput demands of HDT systems, primarily attributed to the complicated consensus process of conventional blockchain solutions. As a result, this article introduces a novel reputation-enhanced shard-based Byzantine fault-tolerant scheme designed for zero-trust HDT systems. We propose a parallel validation-based reputation-enhanced practical Byzantine fault tolerance consensus framework to address the need for improved throughput and reduced latency during data-sharing processes. This framework incorporates a priority-based block-appending process to prevent forking attacks, ensuring that critical aspects of the blockchain-enabled framework, such as security and decentralization, remain uncompromised. Moreover, we formalize the communication process among validators and their computation resource allocation as a Markov decision process. We then adopt the branching duelling Q-network approach to address the challenge posed by the large dimensions of the action space in our formulated problem. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly enhances authentication, authorization, and validation processes in HDT through increased throughput and reduced latency, providing a robust solution for secure and efficient data sharing in HDT systems.

I. Introduction

Human digital twin (HDT) is an emerging technology with the ability to revolutionize the current human-centric environment including the healthcare systems [1], [2], [3]. When adopted toward enabling personalized healthcare systems, it can provide fast, efficient, and accurate healthcare services following the digital twin (DT) concept by combining various technologies including artificial intelligence, data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), and virtual and augmented reality. However, HDT relies on continuous data sharing among physical and virtual twins operating in zero-trust environments where any devices or systems may be compromised, thus the need to ensure that authentication, authorization and validation processes are well managed to facilitate data security and privacy. As a result, blockchain technology has started to gain wide popularity in DT networks to ensure anonymity, authentication, data privacy, trustworthiness, fairness, and data integrity [4], [5], [6].