Bo Han, Associate Professor, Computer Science, and Songqing Chen, Professor, Computer Science, are set to receive funding for the project: "Securing the Metaverse: A Privacy-preserving Zero Trust Approach."
Their long-term goal is to do just that: secure the metaverse.
To do so, they will consider issues including: authentication, authorization, and accounting (3A), management of personal data such as user-generated content (UGC), secure interactions between virtual and real-world objects (e.g., digital twins), etc.
They will focus on authentication in the metaverse and argue that it should satisfy four design objectives: zero trust, high reliability, non-intrusive interaction, and privacy preservation. More specifically, they propose to explore the emerging security threats and privacy concerns in social virtual reality, the early prototype of the metaverse, and propose a privacy-preserving continuous and adaptive authentication scheme by employing a federated-learning-based zero-trust framework that authenticates users with multimodal biometric information. This project will shed light on addressing the security and privacy challenges in the future development of the metaverse.
Han and Chen will receive $80,000 from the Virginia Innovation Partnership Authority for this work. Funding will begin in late May 2022 and will end in late May 2023.
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