A Survey on Metaverse: Fundamentals, Security, and Privacy

TL;DR

This survey reviews the fundamentals, security, and privacy challenges of the metaverse, highlighting recent technological advances and discussing countermeasures and future research directions for secure, scalable, and interoperable metaverse systems.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of metaverse architecture, security threats, privacy issues, and summarizes current countermeasures and open research challenges.

Findings

Identifies key security and privacy threats in metaverse systems.

Reviews state-of-the-art countermeasures for metaverse security.

Highlights open research directions for future metaverse development.

Abstract

Metaverse, as an evolving paradigm of the next-generation Internet, aims to build a fully immersive, hyper spatiotemporal, and self-sustaining virtual shared space for humans to play, work, and socialize. Driven by recent advances in emerging technologies such as extended reality, artificial intelligence, and blockchain, metaverse is stepping from science fiction to an upcoming reality. However, severe privacy invasions and security breaches (inherited from underlying technologies or emerged in the new digital ecology) of metaverse can impede its wide deployment. At the same time, a series of fundamental challenges (e.g., scalability and interoperability) can arise in metaverse security provisioning owing to the intrinsic characteristics of metaverse, such as immersive realism, hyper spatiotemporality, sustainability, and heterogeneity. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the fundamentals, security, and privacy of metaverse. Specifically, we first investigate a novel distributed metaverse architecture and its key characteristics with ternary-world interactions. Then, we discuss the security and privacy threats, present the critical challenges of metaverse systems, and review the state-of-the-art countermeasures. Finally, we draw open research directions for building future metaverse systems.