In June 2021, Facebook launched the 2021 Towards Trustworthy Products in AR, VR, and Smart Devices request for proposals (RFP). Today, we’re announcing the winners of this award.

This RFP is a continuation of the 2020 Explorations of Trust in AR, VR, and Smart Devices RFP. Through this series of RFPs, the Facebook Reality Labs Security Assurance team aims to foster further innovation and deepen their collaboration with academia in the areas of trust in AR, VR, and smart device products. The mixed-reality and smart device industries continue to evolve and present unique use cases and considerations. They bring entirely new categories of technologies and thus entirely new security and privacy challenges. With these new challenges comes the opportunity to explore new methods and models for considering trust.

This second round of awarded research will explore the following:

• Perception integrity, location tampering attacks, and multi-application tenancy in AR and VR
• Strong and usable biometric and multifactor authentication methods for mixed-reality products’ form factors
• Imaging and ML techniques for hardware and supply chain security assurance
• Privacy-preserving methods and controls for eye tracking in AR and VR
• Privacy and assurance in 3D point clouds for mixed reality

The team reviewed 83 high-quality proposals and are pleased to announce the eight winning proposals and five honorable mentions. Thank you to everyone who took the time to submit a proposal, and congratulations to the winners.

Through this RFP, we hope to fund ongoing research efforts that will help Facebook Reality Labs and the broader XR industry and communities better understand and address these nascent risk areas in our efforts to build trustworthy products.

Research award winners

Accessible multi-factor authentication in augmented reality glasses

Rahul Chatterjee, Earlence Fernandes, Yuhang Zhao (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

Hardware trojan detection through imaging and machine learning

Navid Asadi, Mark Tehranipoor (University of Florida)

Location tampering in multi-user AR: attacks and defenses

Jiasi Chen, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh (University of California, Riverside)

Perception integrity in virtual reality

Seongkook Heo, Yuan Tian (University of Virginia)

Privacy-preserving eye tracking for AR/VR with adversarial learning

Guohao Lan, Xucong Zhang (Delft University of Technology)

Provably robust 3D point cloud classification for mobile augmented reality

Maria Gorlatova, Neil Gong (Duke University)

Towards secure multi-application augmented and virtual reality platforms

Franziska Roesner, Tadayoshi Kohno (University of Washington)

Usable privacy control for real-time eye tracking in AR/VR

Kassem Fawaz, Younghyun Kim (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

Finalists

Hardware and software for enforcing security on camera-based AR/VR apps

Samuel T. King, Jason Lowe-Power, Zubair Shafiq (University of California, Davis)

Preventing misactivation of voice assistant using head orientation

Anupam Das (North Carolina State University)

Privacy-utility aware 3D visual data transformation

Kanchana Thilakarathna, Albert Zomaya (University of Sydney)

Selective sharing and spatial privacy preservation in mixed reality

Imad Elhajj, Ayman Kayssi, Noel Maalouf (American University of Beirut)

X-ray assurance for printed circuit boards in AR/VR applications

Navid Asadi, Mark Tehranipoor (University of Florida)