CAREER: Towards Secure and Trustworthy Collaborative Immersive Systems

Collaborative immersive systems use augmented, virtual, and mixed reality to merge physical and digital worlds, allowing multiple users to share and interact within the same three-dimensional space in real time through natural actions such as gaze, gestures, and spatial manipulation. By creating a sense of shared presence, these systems enable new forms of collaboration in critical domains such as healthcare, education, and workforce training. However, unlike web or mobile platforms where users interact independently through a screen, each user's actions in these systems are sensed and directly affect what every other user sees and experiences. This introduces security and privacy risks that are fundamentally different from those in traditional computing, as a malicious participant can manipulate what others see and experience, impersonate trusted users, or exploit the sensitive data that these systems continuously capture about users' bodies, movements, and surroundings, risks that are amplified as these systems integrate AI-driven features. Existing security approaches cannot address these risks because they do not account for the multi-user, embodied nature of immersive interaction. The project's novelties are a principled framework that formally models the multi-layered interactions unique to collaborative immersive environments and provides integrated mechanisms for trust establishment among participants, secure provenance of shared interactions, and adaptive security and privacy policy enforcement. The project's broader significance and importance are in enabling trustworthy immersive collaboration that people can safely rely on in high-stakes settings, contributing to industry-wide security standards, and cultivating a workforce skilled in securing next-generation computing platforms. The specific goals of this project are divided into three research thrusts. The first thrust constructs formal models of embodied multi-user behavior to enable the systematic discovery and analysis of emergent threats that arise from the composition of individual user actions in collaborative immersive systems. The second thrust designs novel mechanisms to establish and maintain trust among participants throughout the lifecycle of a collaborative session, addressing the challenges of verifying user identity and managing group membership in real-time embodied environments. The third thrust develops methods to track the integrity of shared interactions and enforce security policies without disrupting the user experience, ensuring that the collaborative environment remains accurate and tamper-resistant. The outcomes of this project will enhance the current security practices for immersive systems and guide the design of future real-time, multi-user computing platforms. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2544561 | Program: 01002930DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT,01003031DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT,01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Habiba Farrukh | Institution: University of California-Irvine, IRVINE, CA | Award Amount: $339,622 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2544561 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2544561.html