Cybersecurity Threat Modeling for the Industrial Metaverse: A Stride Framework Perspective

As Metaverse expanding its application in various sectors, the Industrial Metaverse has found a special place in the Industry 5.0 phenomenon. Regarding the importance of security in Metaverse, this paper focuses on the cybersecurity aspect of the Industrial Metaverse by studying its cyber threats in the manufacturing domain. With this respect, a systematic review of the literature was conducted and after providing the practical definition and conceptual architecture of the Industrial Metaverse, the STRIDE method is used to categorize the cyber threats of the domain. Subsequently, the proposed modeling framework discusses 27 distinct sub-threat classes along with their impacts, industrial instances, and target assets. The findings of the research show that the enabling and industrial application layers of the reference architecture are the main domains for the cyber threats/attacks, while the spoofing, tampering, and DoS threat classes can widely target the structure of the Industrial Metaverse. Furthermore, the tampering, spoofing, information disclosure, and DoS threat classes respectively include 33 %, <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{2 3 \%}, \mathbf{1 8 \%}$</tex>, and <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{1 4 \%}$</tex> of the attacks. The results of the paper demonstrate the ability of the STRIDE framework in comprehensively realizing the cyber threats and their mapping to the crucial assets of the Industrial Metaverse. Therefore, the results can be further utilized to identify the proper security measures and risk assessment in the way that boosts the trustworthiness, sustainability and safety of the Industrial Metaverse.