Any technology brings a lot of benefit to human society, so will the metaverse. However, every technology in this world has security and privacy concerns, with no exception to the metaverse. Metaverse security and privacy concerns are huge at this stage and need to be addressed immediately.
In this post, I will briefly analyze the possible metaverse security and privacy concerns. First, I will discuss some general serious security and privacy related problems of the metaverse. After that, I will list the 4 categories of these concerns and briefly discuss them. Finally, I will put up a general solution to the security and privacy problem in the metaverse.
OVERALL SECURITY AND PRIVACY RELATED PROBLEMS IN METAVERSE
The metaverse will bring a lot of benefits to the people in the real universe. But we are confronted with new and serious metaverse security and privacy concerns despite its benefits.
First and most important, sensitive information in the real world may be stolen through terminals. You might know avatars have closer relationships with other avatars in the metaverse rather than other virtual worlds like online games. Data may be stolen by malicious avatars easily.
Second, the avatars have a lot of interaction with other avatars and non-player characters. This is intended not to be understood by others.
Third, there will definitely be scenarios in the metaverse that will make some users feel inappropriate due their difference of thought, political alignment, culture etc.
Fourth and finally, the ownership of contents, transition of contents and goods in the metaverse is a huge challenge as huge financial risk is involved.
4 PRESPECTIVE OF METAVERSE SECURITY AND PRIVACY CONCERNS
The development of metaverse is accompanied by security and privacy concerns. Specifically, these concerns can be divided into 4 main categories or perspective. They are listed below.
- User Information
- Communication
- Scenario
- Contents
Let us discuss them briefly from these 4 perspectives.
USER INFORMATION
Multi-sensor fusion is one of the characterics of the metaverse. A lot of sensors are used in the enabling technologies of the metaverse. These sensors are necessary since they help you to view an immersive version of the metaverse.
These sensor collect a huge amount of data from the user. The data collected by these sensors are listed below.
- User Physiological data
- User Physical data
- Biometric data of the user
- Social data of the user.
These data are too personal and sensitive for all of us. If this data is leaked, it will endanger the security and privacy of you. So, user information data is a metaverse security and privacy concern. Hence, it is critical that user information data is protected.
Specific treatment and protection is needed to address metaverse security and privacy concerns for user information. It can be classified into 3 types. They are
- Generalized
- White-List
- Black-List.
These method of protection will be discussed in upcoming post this blog metaversetroop.com
COMMUNICATION
Communication in the metaverse is one of the metaverse security and privacy concerns. High interactivity and sociality is one of the features of metaverse. A lot of communication and interaction takes place between different components of metverse architecture.
The metaverse architecture components include the following.
- Human World
- Physical World
- Digital World
So, many activities like
- Sharing
- Cooperating
- Mutual trust
- Understanding
in the metaverse are difficult to be done without the help of communication. User information is not shared in communication between different entities in the metaverse. But, the real communication data and content are highly private and sensitive.
So, it is important to protect communication and it should be shielded from non-communicators. The non-communicators should be prevented from comprehending and recovering contents of the communication. We need to find a good solution to address metaverse security and privacy concerns.
SCENARIO
It is possible to encounter the same security and privacy concerns as the real realm as well as in the metaverse. Scenario in context to metaverse means
There are 2 main aspects to consider in metaverse security and privacy concerns in terms of scenario. They are
- the scenario itself
- Avatars in the scenario
In the metaverse platform, a great number of users gather together. There will be a lot of differences among the users. Their understanding of culture, religions, political thought, etc will vary a lot. Thus, the scenario in the metaverse will not meet everyone’s wish. This will even lead to misunderstanding among the avatars.
The influx of the users will introduce new problems for the avatars in the scenario. Some malicious and immoral users will insult, track, or even harass other avatars in the metaverse. This has happened recently in Meta’s Horizon Workroom. So, Meta introduced personal boundaries on each avatars. This is a good way to solve metaverse security and privacy concerns.
CONTENTS
Imagination, High Creativity, high degree of freedom and high personalization are some of the characterics of the metaverse. The users create all kinds of goods, such as character modeling costumes, building, appearance, artwork, etc. These are either created through efforts or through the cost of money. So, they include both spiritual and financial value.
The contents generated by users are Virtual Digital Goods (VDA) in the form of NFT, Virtual Land, Assets, Tokens etc. They do not want these to be illegally taken by anyone or damaged.
Damage here means that a user doesn’t want the VDA they have created or owned to be seen with others. For example, an avatar tailors a personalized dress for himself/herself and may not want to be worn by others.
Content transactions may be damaged or taken control by malicious users. So, the user should have a demand to anonymize rights in the translation. Hence, it is important to protect contents in the metaverse.
To mitigate metaverse security and privacy concerns, blockchain is an excellent solution to the problems. Blockchain has an important role in the metaverse in terms of securing ownership, traceability and transfer of goods in the metaverse.
GENERAL SOLUTION TO METAVERSE SECURITY AND PRIVACY CONCERNS
SO, you have seen that there are metaverse security and privacy concerns in every stage. The simplest method to solve all the metaverse security and privacy concerns is to prohibit users from entering the metaverse. Black and white listing the users can do it, as you do in your mobile phone for calls. But, this is the crudest method.
Some of the methods to solve metaverse security and privacy concerns are listed below.
- New Buckets Effect
- White-Listing and Black-Listing
- Communication Encryption
There is a need to find other methods and improve the above methods. It is important for you and the researchers and scientists out there, to notice the metaverse security and privacy concerns and find solutions to achieve better effects.
CONCLUSION
In this blog post, I have discussed briefly the metaverse security and privacy concerns in terms of four perspectives- User Information, Communication, Scenario and Contents. I tried to highlight some general concerts on security and privacy.
Metaverse security and privacy concerns are inevitable at this infant stage of the metaverse. These metaverse security and privacy concerns need to be solved as soon as possible.
