Privacy of the Metaverse: Current Issues, AI Attacks, and Possible Solutions

Metaverse is a key emerging digital transformation concept for the next generation of cyberspace. It is expected to create a self-sustaining virtual ecosystem of fully immersive, real-time experiences with numerous opportunities for general users and industries to interact with the world. With the introduction of 6G networks and enabling technologies, the metaverse will achieve its success on a large scale. However, with increasing interaction using new technologies and a lot of third-party services, there would be an arena for more possibilities of privacy threats. Hence, privacy requirements are critical for the metaverse. They should be cautiously investigated since we see the commercial adoption of the metaverse is imminent. Therefore, this paper discusses different privacy issues, potential Artificial Intelligence (AI) related privacy attacks and possible solutions to the metaverse. We initiate this by introducing the concepts of the metaverse and privacy. We then discuss potential privacy issues that could occur with the future metaverse. We present a new attack approach utilizing combined membership inference and reconstruction attacks that can be launched against metaverse users. We also propose viable techniques and tools that could act as possible solutions to those issues.