Towards Safer Mixed Reality: Identifying, Evaluating, and Mitigating Security and Privacy Threats

Mixed-reality (MR) technologies merge virtual content with users’ perceptions of the real-world environment. These technologies revolutionize how humans interact with the surrounding world, and enhance machine understanding of human behavior and physical spaces. Though these technologies bring great potential benefits, they also raise new and serious computer security and privacy risks. For example, risks could arise from privacy-invasive data input (e.g., eye-tracking, hand-tracking, or spatial understanding of the physical world), user interaction with the three-dimensional virtual content, and user perception of the environment that blends real and virtual visual objects. My research aims to identify potential security and privacy risks, evaluate these risks in today’s MR systems, and develop mitigation solutions to enhance user safety.