Security and Privacy for Extended Reality Systems: Attacks and threat models
IEEE Montreal CS/CIS Jt. Chapter Technical Talk
AR/VR devices promise a new era of immersive computing, where our everyday experience is augmented with helpful information (Augmented Reality), or where we are immersed in fully virtual worlds (Virtual Reality). These systems fuse the physical world, and the virtual world, through computing resources to provide these immersive experiences rendered on the user's headset. As a result, it allows new opportunities for attackers to compromise the security and privacy of users that are not well understood. Towards understanding the security and privacy challenges in these systems, this talk presents a number of recent attacks we developed on AR/VR systems. One threat model exploits the shared computing resources used by multiple applications on a headset to extract information through side channels; we show attacks that spy on user activity or compromise privacy. Another threat model exploits the shared state among multiple users in a multi-user application, allowing malicious users to inject compromised information or to recover information they are not allowed to access. Other threat models include those that interfere with applications and cause the virtual model to become out of sync with the physical world, causing user motion sickness or bypassing safety guardrails. I will conclude with discussion of potential defenses and ways to build more security AR/VR experiences.
Date and Time
Location
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Registration
- Date: 20 Jun 2025
- Time: 12:00 AM UTC to 01:00 AM UTC
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- Co-sponsored by IEEE Montreal Section
- Starts 20 May 2025 04:00 AM UTC
- Ends 20 June 2025 04:00 AM UTC
- No Admission Charge
Speakers
Dr. Nael Abu-Ghazaleh
Biography:
Dr. Nael Abu-Ghazaleh is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering as well as the Electrical and Computer Engineering Departments at the University of California, Riverside. His research is in architecture and system security, high-performance computing, and systems and security for Machine Learning. He has published over 250 papers in these areas, several of which have been recognized with best paper awards or nominations. His offensive security research has resulted in the discovery of several new attacks on CPUs and GPUs that have been disclosed to companies including Intel, AMD, ARM, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia, and resulted in patches and modifications to products, and coverage from technical news outlets. He is a member of the Micro Hall of Fame, an ACM distinguished member, and an IEEE distinguished speaker.
Agenda
20:00 Hours - START of Distinguished Lecture
21:00 Hours - END of Distinguished Lecture
21:00 Hours - Start of Q&A, Discussions, Thoughts, etc
ALL times are in EDT/EST format
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