CAREER: Towards Secure Augmented Reality Platforms

增强现实（AR）技术——将数字生成的信息叠加在用户对物理世界的感知上——正处于商业可行性的尖端，出现在微软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。这个项目的重点是调查和解决AR应用程序产生的虚拟输出（视觉、音频或触觉反馈）带来的安全和隐私问题。例如，考虑一个AR汽车挡风玻璃应用程序，它用引人注目的广告挡住了用户对行人或道路标志的视线，或者用突然响起的响亮的广告叮当声吓到用户；这种行为可能会造成严重的人身安全隐患。或者考虑一下像微软HoloLens这样的AR头戴式显示器，其中一个应用程序可能会在用户的视觉环境中恶意绘制引起恐惧症的物体（比如蜘蛛）。结合综合教育和推广工作，这项工作为推动研究和行业向增强现实平台发展提供了技术基础，这些平台提供了丰富的功能和强大的安全性、隐私性和安全性。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：同时实现高性能和丰富功能的安全性、隐私性和安全性；减轻对人身和财产造成人身伤害的风险；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缺陷的AR应用程序输出（即视觉，音频或触觉反馈）所带来的风险来应对这些挑战，经验性地评估现有和新兴AR平台（例如微软HoloLens和Meta的眼镜）中的这些风险，并探索AR平台的操作系统在保护不受信任应用程序的虚拟输出方面的作用，同时使应用程序开发人员能够创建丰富的，引人注目的AR场景。研究人员正在为AR操作系统设计选项，以及为新兴的AR平台（包括汽车挡风玻璃和头戴式显示器）如何管理AR输出提供更广泛的安全和安全建议。

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.