Metaverse Cybersecurity: Building Resilience in the Future Internet

The integration of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and extended reality (XR) throughout centralized and decentralized platforms is facilitating immersive experiences that offer boundless consumer and industry value across multiple sectors. As these frontiers continue to offer enhanced communication and connectivity, the future of the internet presents new avenues for global interaction and innovation. Therefore, ensuring resilient digital ecosystems that support secure environments for diverse global usership is imperative to realizing the potential of the metaverse and its place as one of the drivers for the internet’s unfolding future.

Protecting the next phase of the internet requires a preventative, forward-looking approach that involves the whole of society and prioritizes building trust, promoting agency and safeguarding user experiences. While systems are not impenetrable and platforms are not impervious, stakeholders can mitigate long-term risk by approaching cybersecurity through a focus on resilience, the ability for systems to operate under attack and recover efficiently.

As part of the ongoing work of the governance track of the World Economic Forum’s Defining and Building the Metaverse Initiative, this briefing paper outlines the unique cybersecurity challenges associated with the metaverse and the next phase of the internet. It seeks to guide the attention of decision-makers and developers with the ethical, resilient cybersecurity considerations from a global governance perspective, with the purpose of tackling these cyber risks while they are still in their nascent stages – to prepare metaverse ecosystems to stand against harms posed by threat actors and sustain through undesired behaviours by users or systems themselves.