Security hardening of mixed reality

Project Title:

Supervisor(s):

Alireza Jolfaei, Iqbal Gondal, Joarder Kamruzzaman

Contact person and email address:

Alireza Jolfaei a.jolfaei@federation.edu.au

A brief description of the project:

Mixed reality is beginning to reach a state that can transform how we interact with technology. We have already made a leap from point, click and type to touch, tap and swipe. Mixed reality opens the door for game-changing communication and collaboration paradigms that operate in connection with humans’ natural behaviour patterns. In this regard, the large-scale integration of heterogeneous IoT devices to manage and control a wide variety of mixed reality environments will hugely increase the attack surface, the scope for misconfigurations, and hence unsafe or conflicting behaviour of various devices and subsystems, which in turn can place the human in unsafe and hazardous situations, both mentally and physically. Therefore, understanding the semantics of human-in-the-loop IoT networks and context of their behaviour is critical to dispose incorrect configurations and build a proactive resilience and a reactive defence against evolving threats. The aim of this research is to provide fundamentally new methods for security-aware modelling, analysis and design of safety-critical mixed reality systems, addressing the many different physical, functional and logical aspects of these heterogeneous systems in the presence of adversaries. This research will lead to cyber-physical security techniques that exploit the interaction between physical and cyber domains for attack detection and resilient control, and it will give a framework for secure control of human-in-the-loop cyber physical systems that harnesses the human power of inductive reasoning and the ability to provide context, particularly during an attack, to improve the overall security guarantees.