CAUSE: a context-aware user security enhancement model for trustworthy consumer immersive applications

Consumer-focused virtual immersive environments including AR and VR metaverse applications are creating new ways for people to interact, collaborate, and engage in commerce. Simultaneously, user privacy, trust, and security are also at great risk in these environments. This paper proposes the Context-Aware User Security Enhancement (CAUSE) model, which is a policy-based, user-centric, comprehensive, and real-time protection mechanism against such threats. For proactive threat detection and user interaction management, CAUSE incorporates a personalized AI agent. Fine-grained control is exercised by the user through user-defined security policies, interpreted by the policy engine to support context-aware, scenario-based controls. To ensure interoperability across diverse immersive platforms, it envisages user-defined security policy migration and consistent enforcement. The simulation results show that CAUSE effectively addresses threats, caters to complex interaction scenarios and improves user safety in virtual immersive environments. In the simulated evaluation, the Decision Tree risk classifier achieved 94.45% overall accuracy for three-class risk classification and a High-Risk recall of 90.83%. CAUSE addresses some of the key issues with current user-security methods and contributes to the development of safer and more trustworthy consumer immersive environments.