Security and Privacy Risks of Immersive Technology

The announcement from immersive technologies ushered in a new paradigm, where  augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality –powered systems transformed the way humans interacted with the digital system surrounding them. These technologies also create entirely new and unprecedented opportunities in excitation, healthcare, industry, entertainment, and collaboration, but equally an entirely new category of security and privacy threats. Immersive systems do not arise, like traditional digital platforms, above the noise of our human lives; rather, they lie deep within a user environment, their physical, cognitive, and sensory space, and therefore, they are free to harvest troves of personal, behavioral, and environmental data, which are far out of the reach of traditional digital systems. This chapter aims to evaluate the key security and privacy challenges of immersive technologies in the aspect of information overload, vision harm, and user safety threat when combined with human–computer interaction, automation, cloud and mobile computing, pervasive and sensor-rich devices, immersive environments increase the operational capacity of these systems but also widen the attack surface. With the shift of immersive technologies toward real-world use, it is critical to be able to identify their security challenges and vulnerabilities, which is critical to the ethical and trustworthy deployment of these systems.