As the realization of the metaverse means more and more connected technologies, there are still many technical challenges to overcome. Metaverse implementations will require massive amounts of data from motion and environmental sensors to track human participants, as well as a huge variety of actuators, sensors, and displays to provide users with physical, such as haptic, audio, and visual feedback.
Like other IoT devices, each of these sensors and feedback devices will be connected almost entirely wirelessly to the control systems of the Metaverse, which will almost certainly be cloud-based. All of these cloud connections present a huge potential attack surface that hackers can exploit and potentially take control of the metaverse.
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1. The technical difficulties that the Metaverse needs to overcome
As we’ve seen in the Ready Player One series of books and movies, there are many technical challenges we must overcome before a ubiquitous vision of the metaverse can be realized, but the need for absolute security of all required physical equipment, may Not a priority for today’s Metaverse developers. Actually this is a mistake. If users are concerned about their personal safety, they will be reluctant to enter the metaverse. The first inevitable hack by an early and not fully secure metaverse will surely be widely publicized, fueling this concern.
Unfortunately, security is not an afterthought. From the outset, security needs to be part of hardware design specifications, especially software. In particular, software needs to be updatable, as the latest software is always the safest. Critical vulnerabilities and exposures are inevitably found in any software over time, often which is why we seem to be pushing software updates to our phones every month.
It is critical to fix these vulnerabilities as soon as possible before they are exploited by bad actors. Fixing the vulnerability requires updating the software of the devices, first in the lab, and then deploying the updated software to the fleet of devices in the field. Most IoT devices are built using some form of open source software, such as Linux. There are many benefits to doing so, including the fact that the open source community can quickly resolve bugs and vulnerabilities as they are discovered.
The problem facing device manufacturers is how to keep track of which versions of each software component are used for software releases across all the different device types. Without an easy way to check which version is being used, there is no way of knowing if a product is affected by a vulnerability or if the device software needs to be updated.
2. The complex security issues of the metaverse
The problem is compounded when OEMs deploy many different types of devices, all with slightly different development times and slightly different software releases for each device. Engineers need to comb through each device’s software to determine if it was affected by the device manufacturer, and if so, build and test a new software image for each device type to fix the problem. Once device manufacturers have tested software images for each of their products, they need to deploy the update to all of their devices, which can cause even more problems.
Do they have the ability to update their fleet of devices over-the-air, or do they need to send a technician to update each device over the network, which is not realistic if there are millions of metaverse sensors to update. Do they need to update the entire software image on the device, or can they incrementally update only the few lines of code that have changed, saving a lot of expensive bandwidth and time.
What if the vulnerability is in the device operating system or firmware, such as the bootloader? Perhaps device manufacturers are able to update application software, but bootloader updates may never have been included in the original specification. Finally, do they have the ability to deploy software updates in batches, perhaps with a test update to a small number of field devices to confirm that the software update is OK before doing a large update to each deployed device.
All IoT devices (like gym turnstiles) benefit from software development tools that make managing and updating devices easier, sometimes over many years, and they need the ability to ensure software and device communication from the very beginning of the development process security.