Secure Selective Disclosure of Data for Digital Twinning Services | Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering | Springer Nature Link

Yes, the article "Secure Selective Disclosure of Data for Digital Twinning Services" explicitly states that digital twins act as intermediaries between IoT devices and data consumers, which improves availability and enables access control.

Key details from the research include: Third-Party Infrastructure: Digital twins are often hosted by independent third-party infrastructure providers (e.g., cloud services) separate from IoT device owners. Selective Disclosure: The infrastructure provider discloses only the data that each consumer is authorized to access, while hiding sensitive information. * Security Challenge: Traditional redaction breaks legacy signatures, forcing consumers to trust the provider for authenticity; this paper proposes a lightweight signing solution to allow consumers to verify the integrity and provenance of revealed data without shared secrets.

• Scope and problem framing. The article addresses a core trust and privacy challenge in digital-twin ecosystems: twins act as persistent, data-rich intermediaries between IoT devices and external consumers, but their value depends on sharing state, telemetry, and derived analytics without exposing raw or sensitive data to unauthorized parties. The material frames digital twins not merely as mirrors of physical assets, but as controlled data planes that must reconcile high availability with fine-grained access control, selective release, and privacy preservation.

• Key insight and contribution. Its central contribution is to treat selective disclosure as a first-class design requirement for twin-based services, rather than an afterthought applied at the application layer. The work emphasizes that a twin should expose only the minimum necessary data views to each consumer, according to policy, while preserving the confidentiality of underlying device data, operational state, and possibly personal or proprietary information. This implies an architecture in which authorization, data minimization, and cryptographic or policy-driven protection mechanisms are embedded in the twin middleware itself, enabling consumers to obtain useful information without gaining broad access to the full data set.

• Why it matters. This is important because digital twins are increasingly used in multi-tenant, cross-organizational, and safety-critical contexts where unauthorized disclosure can reveal operational vulnerabilities, personal behavior, or competitively sensitive process data. By focusing on secure selective disclosure, the material supports the broader goal of making twins practical for real-world deployment: they can improve availability, support analytics, and enable collaboration while still meeting privacy, compliance, and access-control requirements. In effect, it argues that trustworthy digital-twin services depend on the ability to share selectively, not just to store and expose data.