Cybersecurity changes quickly, following technology trends and adapting to them. The metaverse is broadly used to define the move towards a blended physical and virtual world. One thing is already clear and consistent with the metaverse: it’s changing quickly. Cybersecurity within the context of the metaverse will likely take on many forms, we will explore those possibilities within this article.
Contextualizing the Issue
Cybersecurity is all about the relevancy of business or environmental goals. There will always be general software or network-related issues that lead to exploitation. Our primary focus today will be on what is sometimes referred to as “business logic” or the exploitation of technical deficiencies to manipulate the goals of metaverse applications and environments to some malicious gain.
Fraud
There’s already a lot of talk on the Internet about NFT currency exchanges as the backbone of commerce in the metaverse. Digital art, gaming skins, and experiences are being created and sold online. Traditional forms of fraud such as copying and auction manipulation will likely make their way into the metaverse. Platforms and services will need to build technical defenses and contractual (such as terms of use) mechanisms in to protect their users.
Digital Asset Theft
Theft of accounts to transfer, sell, or otherwise steal digital assets is not a new issue. This issue has existed in games such as World of Warcraft and Fortnite for some time now. In large part, it boils down to account security and the ability of an individual’s account to withstand takeover attempts. Is multi-factor authentication turned on? Is a unique and sufficiently strong passphrase being used? Does the platform alert the user of suspicious activity?
Depending on how interconnected metaverse experiences are, authentication and authorization protocols will need to support. Similarly, creating user experiences that make the secure way, the easy way, will help scale good practices at the user account level.
Identity Manipulation
Building on the issue of account takeovers, taking over an account could have the equivalent effect of taking over an email account. In the web threat model, email is connected to most other services. Password resets and subsequent access are oftentimes managed through email accounts. Compromising a metaverse identity may lead to all sorts of localized abuse cases. This will depend on the way services integrate with one another.
Vulnerabilities Resulting From Rushed Timelines and Complexity
Complexity is oftentimes the enemy of cybersecurity. With the divergent ideas of what the metaverse may become, it’s quite possible it will mean many things to many people and organizations. A rush to market and general complexity of the web, network, spatial graphics rendering, and embedded devices coming together is likely to result in issues.
Vulnerabilities can be leveraged for all manner of things:
- Creating denial of service conditions
- Theft of data
- Ransomware conditions
- Espionage
- And on and on and on
A larger attack surface will also be a contributing factor to an increase in traditional and altogether new classes of vulnerabilities.
Concluding Thoughts
The list above is by no means exhaustive; it would be quite challenging to predict the issues for something that isn’t yet a reality. With how the metaverse shaping up, my forecast for cybersecurity is we will see a combination of:
- Virtual evolutions of traditional forms of crime, fraud, and abuse
- A whole new attack surface with new and old vulnerability classes represented
If this concept does permeate life as the marketing hype suggests it could, cybersecurity and privacy are going to be all that more important in the metaverse. Some of these issues have thus far been limited to video games and the online worlds that go along with them. The impact is largely limited to users of games and their online worlds in this closed-loop system. The metaverse could bridge gaps we are only beginning to appreciate and wrap our arms around.
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