Blockchain Enabled Architecture for Secure Authentication in the Metaverse Environment: A Student Training Use Case
Sonali Patwe, Sunil B. Mane
Abstract
Metaverse technology comprises of a virtual world and physical world running in parallel. Metaverse is evolving day by day and has many applications across domains. In this paper, we focus on the Education domain and especially student training related use cases such as inter-disciplinary research, field visits, campus exchange programs, remote learning, virtual trainings, etc. In such user scenarios, multiple virtual and physical worlds come together in metaverse using technologies like Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Extended Reality (XR). In such Metaverse environments, avatars, users, and devices interact with one another. While interacting, they use the conventional centralized architecture for authentication and identity management. Due to its centralized nature, such architectures are susceptible to various authentication security issues such as impersonation, identity interoperability, mutual authentication, replay, server spoofing, etc. For the student training related use cases, Avatars are moving across multiple Edu-verses. There are certain decentralized solutions proposed in the literature for the authentication and identity management for Avatars. But they come with their own limitations. Also, none of them talk about the authentication interoperability across verses. In this paper, Blockchain is proposed as a solution for the secure and interoperable authentication and identity management for the authentication of Avatars and users for the student training use cases.