Preface: Security and Safety in the “Metaverse”

Abstract

In recent years, as the flow dividend peaking and supervision tend to be rigorous due to industrial monopolization, mobile internet has suffered from a development bottleneck at the top. Liu illustrates this issue in her article and gives a general overview of the security issues of the metaverse [1]. As she says, the essence of mobile internet is platform economy. Such “movement of enclosures” based on the user resource reaches the top with the advent of the mobile terminal era and also steps into the dilemma with the enhancement of closure and monopoly, it is more urgent to transform new development pattern. As a new generation of information technology becomes clear in the development path, the “Metaverse” concept based on composite new information technology has been proposed and is highly concerned. Such a new model with the attribute of “being owned by users” and “decentralization” complies with the underlying demands of industry breakthrough and becomes the next generation of network solutions which is put into practice by more and more leading companies. However, the “Metaverse” develops at the initial phase, because the technology ecology, business ecology, and public cognition are not perfect, and confront multi-dimensional and coupled safety issues. We hereby have organized the “Metaverse security” topic in the Security and Safety (S&S) for such an emerging and hot field, covering the contribution of seven groups of research personnel in every field. We have been devoted to covering the safety issue of “Metaverse” from the perspective of construction, operation, recognition, etc., providing the corresponding solution and offering wisdom and direction for its steady development. The “Metaverse” needs to be achieved by compounding various technologies, including Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud computing, Blockchain, etc., so, it is necessary to construct lots of infrastructure facilities accordingly to support its operation. In this topic, there is a review from Li et al. [2], which expounds on the main components of “Metaverse” infrastructure facilities and systematically summarizes the inherent security risks in “Metaverse” infrastructure facilities. Then Li et al., guided by the system security technology philosophy, propose to construct the safety defense system of “Metaverse” in terms of computing, cloud, network, digital assets, terminal, etc. from different perspectives, which lays a solid foundation for coping with “Metaverse” security risk and challenges. Except for the support of infrastructure facilities, the generalized function security issue, including functional safety and network safety exists in the operation of “Metaverse”. The traditional system reliability technology and network defense technology cannot provide the quantifiable design implementation theory and method. The operating system as the footstone of the software system needs an efficient security guarantee. Here is an article from Song et al. [3] that introduces the OS-level DHR architecture with a multi-kernel operating system as a carrier. The multi-kernel operating system takes the kernel