CS Seminar Series: Yicheng Zhang

About

Securing Extended Reality: From Side Channels and Shared Worlds to AI-Integrated XR

Abstract:

Extended Reality (XR) systems are transforming how users interact with digital content and the physical world through immersive sensing, spatial computing, and increasingly, AI-driven applications. However, the tight coupling of sensing, computation, shared virtual environments, and artificial intelligence creates new security and privacy challenges that extend beyond those of conventional computing systems.

In this talk, I will present our research on security vulnerabilities across different layers of the XR ecosystem. First, I will demonstrate how seemingly benign rendering performance counters can serve as software side channels, allowing unprivileged applications to infer sensitive user interactions, application activities, and environmental information. Next, I will explore security weaknesses in multi-user AR systems, where attackers can manipulate shared spatial states to corrupt virtual content or gain unauthorized access to spatial information. Finally, I will discuss emerging threats in LLM-integrated XR systems, where adversaries can manipulate physical or virtual context to influence AI-generated responses and disrupt user interactions.

Together, these studies reveal how traditional security boundaries are challenged when physical environments, shared virtual worlds, and AI reasoning become tightly integrated. I will conclude by discussing open research challenges toward building secure, privacy-preserving, and trustworthy XR systems.

Bio:

Yicheng Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at George Mason University. His research focuses on hardware and systems security, particularly GPU security, XR and AI-glasses security and privacy, and side-channel attacks. His research has been published or accepted at leading security and XR venues, including IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, ACM CCS, NDSS, and IEEE ISMAR. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside, his M.S. from the University of California, Irvine, and his B.S. from Sichuan University.