Activity Provenance for Rights and Usage Control in Collaborative MR using Blockchain

Collaborative Mixed Reality (MR) provides a virtual/real world in which various users can interact and build virtual objects together. One of the issues in collaborative MR is permission and rights control that defines which user can access which virtual object. A user may define access rights for other users to access the virtual objects created by her/him, which might enable the other users to manipulate the existing virtual object, delete them, or even steal them. For maintaining accountability in the collaborative world, each activity of each user should be maintained against each object. Hence, an activity provenance mechanism is required for a collaborative MR environment, which can be used to identify the culprit. In this paper, a secure activity provenance mechanism for collaborative MR environments is proposed which utilizes blockchain technologies to maintain the integrity of the provenance data. The proposed scheme is implemented on a consortium blockchain using Hyperledger Fabric as a proof of concept. The presented mechanism is also evaluated using metrics throughput and latency and the results confirm that the proposed solution is best suited for maintaining accountability in a collaborative mixed reality network.