Recent advances in virtual reality (VR) system provide fully immersive
interactions that connect users with online resources, applications, and each
other. Yet these immersive interfaces can make it easier for users to fall prey
to a new type of security attacks. We introduce the inception attack, where an
attacker controls and manipulates a user's interaction with their VR
environment and applications, by trapping them inside a malicious VR
application that masquerades as the full VR system. Once trapped in an
"inception VR layer", all of the user's interactions with remote servers,
network applications, and other VR users can be recorded or modified without
their knowledge. This enables traditional attacks (recording passwords and
modifying user actions in flight), as well as VR interaction attacks, where
(with generative AI tools) two VR users interacting can experience two
dramatically different conversations.
In this paper, we introduce inception attacks and their design, and describe
our implementation that works on all Meta Quest VR headsets. Our implementation
of inception attacks includes a cloned version of the Meta Quest browser that
can modify data as it's displayed to the user, and alter user input en route to
the server (e.g. modify amount of transferredinabankingsession).OurimplementationalsoincludesaclonedVRChatapp,whereanattackercaneavesdropandmodifyliveaudiobetweentwoVRusers.WethenconductastudyonuserswitharangeofVRexperiences,executetheinceptionattackduringtheirsession,anddebriefthemabouttheirexperiences.Only37noticedthemomentaryvisual"glitch"whentheinceptionattackbegan,andallbut1userattributedittoimperfectionsintheVRplatform.Finally,weconsideranddiscussefficacyandtradeoffsforawiderangeofpotentialinceptiondefenses.
