Securing the Metaverse: A Privacy-preserving Zero Trust Approach
Dr. Bo Han
KEY INTERESTS
Immersive video streaming; Augmented, virtual, and mixed reality; the Internet of Things (IoT); Human-computer interaction
AFFILIATIONS/APPOINTMENTS
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, George Mason University
ACADEMIC DEGREES
BS, Computer Science, Tsinghua University
MS, Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong
PhD, Computer Science, University of Maryland
SECURING THE METAVERSE: A PRIVACY-PRESERVING ZERO TRUST APPROACH
This research focuses on securing the Metaverse with a privacy-preserving zero trust approach, by considering issues such as authentication, authorization, and accounting (3A), management of personal data (such as user-generated content), secure interactions between virtual- and real-world objects, etc. Metaverse has been deemed as the next-generation (NextG) Internet. A narrow depiction of Metaverse is that it is a virtual world focusing on social interaction, which connects multiple 3D environments via the Internet. With this advancement comes an associated increase in cyber threats, highlighting the importance of proactively identifying anf building security protocols to be integrated into the design and creation of Metaverse. This project addresses these concerns by exploring emerging security threats and privacy concerns in social virtual reality, the early prototype of the Metaverse, and proposes a new security approach - a privacy-preserving continuous and adaptive authentication scheme by employing a federated-learning-based zero-trust framework that authenticates user with multimodal biometric information.