Abstract
Metaverse, as an evolving paradigm of the next-generation Internet, aims
to build a fully immersive, hyper spatiotemporal, and self-sustaining
virtual shared space for humans to play, work, and socialize. Driven by
recent advances in emerging technologies such as extended reality,
artificial intelligence, and blockchain, metaverse is stepping from the
science fiction to an upcoming reality. However, severe privacy
invasions and security breaches (inherited from underlying technologies
or emerged in the new digital ecology) of metaverse can impede its wide
deployment. At the same time, a series of fundamental challenges (e.g.,
scalability and interoperability) can arise in metaverse security
provisioning owing to the intrinsic characteristics of metaverse, such
as immersive realism, hyper spatiotemporality, sustainability, and
heterogeneity.
In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the fundamentals,
security, and privacy of metaverse.
Specifically, we first investigate a novel distributed metaverse
architecture and its key characteristics with ternary-world
interactions. Then, we discuss the security and privacy threats, present
the critical challenges of metaverse systems, and review the
state-of-the-art countermeasures. Finally, we draw open research
directions for building future metaverse systems.