A Survey on Metaverse: Fundamentals, Security, and Privacy

Abstract

Metaverse, as an evolving paradigm of the next-generation Internet, aims to\nbuild a fully immersive, hyper spatiotemporal, and self-sustaining virtual\nshared space for humans to play, work, and socialize. Driven by recent advances\nin emerging technologies such as extended reality, artificial intelligence, and\nblockchain, metaverse is stepping from science fiction to an upcoming reality.\nHowever, severe privacy invasions and security breaches (inherited from\nunderlying technologies or emerged in the new digital ecology) of metaverse can\nimpede its wide deployment. At the same time, a series of fundamental\nchallenges (e.g., scalability and interoperability) can arise in metaverse\nsecurity provisioning owing to the intrinsic characteristics of metaverse, such\nas immersive realism, hyper spatiotemporality, sustainability, and\nheterogeneity. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the\nfundamentals, security, and privacy of metaverse. Specifically, we first\ninvestigate a novel distributed metaverse architecture and its key\ncharacteristics with ternary-world interactions. Then, we discuss the security\nand privacy threats, present the critical challenges of metaverse systems, and\nreview the state-of-the-art countermeasures. Finally, we draw open research\ndirections for building future metaverse systems.\n

Keywords

Affiliated Institutions

• Xi'an Jiaotong University CN
• University of Waterloo CA
• University of Windsor CA

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