Security challenges for immersive media: threats and possible mitigations

Immersive media refers to digital technology that creates a virtual environment or augments a physical scene by adding virtual elements. Unlike traditional media that is non-interactive, immersive media achieve enhanced capabilities because users can interact with the content, allowing them to shape a personalized experience. The main categories of immersive media include virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality. However, the security of immersive technologies has been significantly disregarded in the past year while this type of technology might have severe security risk as occurs for other information and communication technologies, as well as being open to new threats. This thesis begins by providing a detailed overview of immersive systems focusing on virtual reality and proceeds with the analysis of existing security threats, providing a thorough classification of current vulnerabilities in immersive technologies. Subsequently, a review of existing countermeasures to address the previously identified threats will be presented. To have a deeper understanding, a relevant case study is examined and the results are discussed.