An Empirical Study on Virtual Reality Software Security Weaknesses

Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a transformative technology across industries, yet its security weaknesses, including vulnerabilities, are underinvestigated. This study investigates 334 VR projects hosted on GitHub, examining 1,681 software security weaknesses to understand: what types of weaknesses are prevalent in VR software; {\em when} and {\em how} weaknesses are introduced; how long they have survived; and how they have been removed. Due to the limited availability of VR software security weaknesses in public databases (e.g., the National Vulnerability Database or NVD), we prepare the {first systematic} dataset of VR software security weaknesses by introducing a novel framework to collect such weaknesses from GitHub commit data. Our empirical study on the dataset leads to useful insights, including: (i) VR weaknesses are heavily skewed toward user interface weaknesses, followed by resource-related weaknesses; (ii) VR development tools pose higher security risks than VR applications; (iii) VR security weaknesses are often introduced at the VR software birth time.