CAREER: Towards Secure Augmented Reality Platforms

增强现实(AR)技术--将数字生成的信息叠加到用户对物理世界的感知上--正处于商业可行性的边缘，出现在Microsoft HoloLens、Magic Leap、Meta和汽车挡风玻璃等平台上。尽管这些技术提供了巨大的潜在好处，但它们也带来了新的严重的计算机安全和隐私风险。该项目专注于调查和解决由于AR应用程序生成的虚拟输出(视觉、音频或触觉反馈)而产生的安全和隐私问题。例如，考虑一个AR汽车挡风玻璃应用程序，该应用程序用吸引眼球的广告挡住用户对行人或路牌的视线，或者用突然响亮的广告铃声惊吓用户；这种行为可能会造成严重的物理安全影响。或者考虑一下像Microsoft HoloLens这样的AR头盔显示器，在这种显示器中，应用程序可能会在用户的视觉环境中恶意绘制令人恐惧的对象(如蜘蛛)。结合综合教育和推广工作，这项工作提供了一个技术基础，推动研究和行业走向增强现实平台，提供丰富的功能和强大的安全、隐私和安全特性。该项目探索并解决了保护AR应用程序输出的几个技术挑战。这些挑战包括：以高性能和丰富的功能同时实现安全、隐私和安全属性；降低人身和财产受到物理伤害的风险；同时支持多个复杂的应用程序，增强用户对物理世界的看法。该项目通过识别恶意或有漏洞的AR应用程序输出(即视觉、音频或触觉反馈)造成的风险，在现有和新兴的AR平台(例如Microsoft HoloLens和Meta‘s Glass)中对这些风险进行实证评估，并探索AR平台的操作系统在保护不可信应用程序的虚拟输出方面所起的作用，同时使应用程序开发人员能够创建丰富、引人注目的AR场景，从而应对这些挑战。研究人员正在为AR操作系统设计选项，以及针对新兴AR平台(包括汽车挡风玻璃和头盔显示器)应如何管理AR输出提出更广泛的安全建议。

Augmented reality (AR) technologies -- which overlay digitally generated information on a user's perception of the physical world -- are at the cusp of commercial viability, appearing in platforms like Microsoft HoloLens, Magic Leap, Meta, and automotive windshields. Though these technologies offer great potential benefits, they also raise new and serious computer security and privacy risks. This project focuses on investigating and addressing security and privacy issues due to the virtual output (visual, audio, or haptic feedback) that AR applications generate. Consider, for instance, an AR automotive windshield application that blocks the user's view of pedestrians or road signs with attention-grabbing advertisements, or startles the user with sudden loud advertising jingles; this behavior could have serious physical safety implications. Or consider an AR head-mounted display like the Microsoft HoloLens, in which an application might maliciously draw phobia-inducing objects (like spiders) in the user's visual environment. Combined with integrated education and outreach efforts, this work provides a technical foundation that pushes research and industry towards augmented reality platforms that provide rich functionality and strong security, privacy, and safety properties. This project explores and addresses several technical challenges with securing AR application outputs. These challenges include: achieving security, privacy, and safety properties simultaneously with high performance and rich functionality; mitigating the risk of physical harm to people and property; and supporting multiple complex applications simultaneously augmenting the user's view of the physical world. The project addresses these challenges by identifying risks due to malicious or buggy AR application output (i.e., visual, audio, or haptic feedback), empirically evaluating these risks in existing and emerging AR platforms (e.g., Microsoft HoloLens and Meta's glasses), and exploring the role of an AR platform's OS in securing virtual output from untrusted applications, while enabling application developers to create rich, compelling AR scenarios. The researchers are designing options for an AR operating system, as well as broader security and safety recommendations for how emerging AR platforms (including car windshields and head-mounted displays) should manage AR output.