Exploring cybersecurity and forensics of Virtual Reality systems and their impact on cybersecurity education

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Virtual Reality (VR) is a medium that has the potential to transform everyday lives. It immerses the user into a full, 360-degree virtual environment, obscuring the user's view of physical space. VR is an emerging technology but is already present in many modern applications, including engineering, military, healthcare, education, real estate, tourism, social networking, games, retail, and live events. In 2016, 89 million VR headsets were sold worldwide accompanied by substantial investments in VR technology; however, there is almost no cybersecurity education or research exploration of such systems. The goal of this project is to investigate educational approaches to security issues of VR systems in the intersection of cybersecurity and forensics. The proposed curriculum will be supported by lectures and labs and will be disseminated for wider adoption to spark scientific and workforce readiness related to cybersecurity and forensics of VR technology. A significant part of the project will be conducted by student researchers. The learning modules will be used at the University of New Haven, immediately affecting 60 students, and will be disseminated to wider audience through a partnership with almost 400 non-profit, academic, and government partners. This is the first attempt to create educational material for cybersecurity aspect of VR systems, an emerging topic in cybersecurity. Although there are many university programs focusing on Human Computer Interaction, and some on VR developer programs, currently there is no curriculum material covering the security and forensics of VR systems. VR presents opportunities for new types of adversary attacks such as the Man In the Room (MIR) attack, which may place an adversary into a simulated space. If this were the case, would we be able to reconstruct the digital evidence that can tell us what happened? As for the hardware units developed for VR usage: are they secure or can they be exploited? Is it possible for an adversary remotely determine a user's physical location or remotely turn on a user's front mounted camera? These are important security questions that need to be addressed while educating future VR developers.