Project Grant 2221843

This two-year, $300,000 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering program aims to develop techniques to enhance the security and privacy of augmented reality mobile applications. The University of Texas at San Antonio will analyze the software behaviors of augmented reality elements like trackables and anchors to detect potential privilege abuses. Researchers will create a framework to formally model these behaviors over an application's lifecycle. They will also develop anomaly detection methods for reading camera outputs and writing to screens. A study of real augmented reality apps will apply these techniques to evaluate their effectiveness at uncovering unique security issues. The goals are to mitigate risks in augmented reality apps and systems while enabling finer-grained access controls on dynamically generated virtual objects. Results could lead to more secure augmented reality experiences.