Explainable AI and Blockchain for Metaverse: A Security and Privacy Perspective

The next-generation digital revolution is anticipated to be the convergence of Consumer Internet of Things (CIoT) platforms and Metaverse. The use of Metaverse in CIoT can offer a hyper-spatiotemporal, self-sustaining 3-D virtual shared space for people to interact, work, and play. Despite the hype around CIoT-inspired Metaverse, security and privacy concerns are seen as the two biggest obstacles in the communication infrastructure and information gathering procedures. The eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) and blockchain have the potential to reshape and transform the CIoT-inspired Metaverse by bringing significant enhancements in terms of explainability, interpretability, transparency, traceability, and immutability regarding data and communications. In this article, we first discuss the security and privacy issues in CIoT-inspired Metaverse. Second, we discuss the importance and properties of XAI and blockchain with a use case to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed architecture to tackle the aforementioned obstacles. Last, we highlight the future research directions in building futuristic CIoT-inspired Metaverse.