About the author : Alex
There are still numerous technological obstacles to be solved because the metaverse’s installation will lead to an increase in connected technologies.
In order to track human participants in metaverse implementations, motion and environmental sensors will need to collect enormous amounts of data. Actuators, transducers, and display screens will also need to be numerous and diverse in order to provide users with physical (such as haptic), audio, and visual feedback.
Every single one of these sensor and feedback devices will be connected to the Metaverse’s control systems, which are virtually probably going to be located in the cloud, nearly entirely wirelessly, just like other Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets.
A bad actor might use all of these cloud connections as a massive potential attack surface to exploit flaws and possibly take over the Metaverse. Would you choose to enter a potentially compromised Metaverse? While it would be very annoying if a fleet of smart home light switches were compromised and used to launch a Denial of Service (DoS) attack or were simply turned on and off when they shouldn’t be, the consequences would be much worse, even potentially fatal, if a fleet of Metaverse sensors and actuators were affected.
To realize the promise of the metaverse, technical obstacles must be overcome.
As we have seen in the Ready Player One book and film series, there are many technological obstacles that must be overcome before the vision of ubiquitous Metaverses can be realized. However, the need for complete security of all the necessary physical devices may not currently be the top priority of Metaverse developers. This is incorrect. If users are worried about their personal safety, they won’t want to enter a metaverse. Such worries will only grow with the first inevitable hack of a buggy, incompletely secured Metaverse implementation. Unfortunately, security cannot just be bolted on after the fact. Security must be considered from the very beginning when designing hardware and software, especially. Software in particular must be updateable because the most recent versions are always the safest. Any software will inevitably develop critical vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) over time (usually the reason why we have software updates pushed to our phones seemingly every month).
These CVEs must be patched as soon as feasible to prevent malicious actors from using them. The devices’ software must be updated, first in the lab, and then the updated software must be distributed to the device fleets in the field in order to fix CVEs. The majority of Internet of Things (IoT) devices are created utilizing open source software, including Linux. The ability of the open source community to promptly address flaws and CVEs when they are discovered is one of the numerous advantages of this.
How to keep track of which versions of each software component are being utilized in the software distribution for all of their many device kinds is the challenge for device manufacturers. If you don’t have a simple means to determine which version you are running, you won’t know if a CVE has affected your product or not, and you won’t know if you need to update the software on your device.
Security problems in the metaverse may be exacerbated
If an OEM has deployed numerous different device kinds, each produced at a somewhat different time, each with a slightly different software distribution, the issue is made worse. Engineers must examine each device’s software to see if it is impacted by the CVE, and if it is, they must create and test a new software image for each type of device to address the issue. The device manufacturer must deliver the update to all of their devices after they have a tested software image for each of their products, which poses a number of additional challenges.
If there are millions of Metaverse sensors to update, it is not very practical to send a technician to each device to update it over the wire. Do they have the ability to update their device fleets over the air (OTA)? Do the devices need to have their complete software image updated, or can they merely incrementally update the few lines of code that have changed in order to save a significant amount of time and expensive bandwidth? What if the CVE was present in the OS or firmware of the device, such as a boot loader? The OEM might be able to update the application software, but a boot loader upgrade might not be feasible because it was not considered in the original specs. Finally, do they have the capacity to roll out software upgrades gradually, possibly starting with a test update on a small sample of field devices to ensure that there are no problems before rolling out a mass update to all deployed devices?
All IoT devices benefit from software development tools that facilitate fleet management and updates, often for years, and they must have the capability to secure that software and communications with devices from the beginning of the development process.
There are businesses that offer subscription services, such as cloud DevSecOps platform that enables OEM device manufacturers to quickly bring secure IoT and Edge devices to market and manage those devices for the duration of their useful lives. Without such a tool, manufacturers of Internet of Things (IoT) devices run the danger of having to spend more time servicing the products they have previously sold and not having enough time to invest in generating new revenue streams from products with new features. When the devices are used in a Metaverse implementation, where people are interacting with them physically and a security breach could have fatal results, the problem would be made worse.
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