In April, Meta jointly launched the 2022 Meta Security request for proposals (RFP) and the third annual Towards Trustworthy Products in AR, VR, and Smart Devices RFP, as announced by Meta VP of Security Engineering Clyde Rodriguez. Today, we’re excited to announce the winners of these awards.

“We have been committed for years to supporting security work within the academic community,” said Clyde in a recent Q&A. “Both RFPs are another step in making the research community around security more connected to the problems we see in keeping people safe.”

The 2022 Meta Security RFP attracted 136 proposals from 88 universities and institutions around the world. Of these, seven were selected, including two recipients to be funded by WhatsApp. This is our first year running this RFP, and our goal is to broadly support the community of academics participating in security research. We were particularly interested in proposals that focused on program analysis (for security); system and hardware security; applied cryptography; intrusion detection, forensics, and incident response; usable security and human-centered design; and app attestation.

The Towards Trustworthy Products in AR, VR, and Smart Devices RFP attracted 69 high-quality proposals, and the team is pleased to announce the 11 winning proposals and a few honorable mentions. This is the third in a series of annual RFPs focused on fostering further innovation and deepening Meta’s collaboration with academia in the areas of security, privacy, and trust in AR, VR, and smart device products — the core of our Reality Labs product lines. This third round of awarded research will explore multiple areas, including strong and usable AR/VR authentication methods; imaging techniques and compromise-resistance for hardware, manufacturing, and supply chain security assurance; privacy-preserving sensing methods in AR and VR; context-aware voice assistants in the home; identification and mitigation of dark patterns in mixed reality; trustworthy runtime integrity; and unsupervised learning on smart devices.

“We support academic research because we know we can’t solve our problems alone,” said Clyde. “We know that the academic community is an incredible innovation engine, coming up with new ideas and bringing new people into our community. [...] We see this as the starting point for building community around the hardest problems in computer security.”

Thank you to everyone who took the time to submit a proposal, and congratulations to the winners.

Research award recipients

2022 Meta Security Research RFP

A secure speculative execution abstraction across the OS and hardware
Dimitrios Skarlatos (Carnegie Mellon University)

Abstract interpretation and symbolic execution for security
Xavier Rival, Tamara Rezk (French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation)

Analysis and detection of stealthy malware*
Julia Rubin (University of British Columbia)

Cross-platform hardware-based integrity preservation*
Patrick Eugster, Pavel Chuprikov (Università della Svizzera italiana)

Revisiting the privacy of cryptographically protected database search
Evgenios Kornaropoulos (George Mason University)

Software-style symbolic execution for hardware designs
Cynthia Sturton (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Solidifying sanitizer implementations via automated testing
Zhendong Su, Shaohua Li (ETH Zurich)

*Research funded by WhatsApp

2022 Towards Trustworthy Products in AR, VR, and Smart Devices RFP

A toolkit for identification and mitigation of XR dark patterns
Mohamed Khamis, Pejman Saeghe (University of Glasgow)

Appeasing the conflict between run-time integrity & real-time smart devices
Ivan De Oliveira Nunes (Rochester Institute of Technology)

Compromise-resistant secure hardware design
Patrick Schaumont (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)

Harpocrates: Access control system for AR platforms
Amir Rahmati, Arie Kaufman (Stony Brook University)

Physical context-aware voice assistant for smart homes
Anupam Das (North Carolina State University), Nirupam Roy (University of Maryland College Park)

Privacy-preserving sensing for AR, VR, and smart devices
Alanson Sample (University of Michigan)

Towards practical privacy-preserving spatial mapping and localization
Bo Han, Songqing Chen (George Mason University)

Trustworthy AR/VR biometric authentication
Sébastien Marcel (Fondation de l'Institut de recherche Idiap)

Trustworthy unsupervised learning on smart devices via federated clustering
Robert Dick, Ekdeep Lubana (University of Michigan)

User-centric 3D spatial data sharing in metaverse
Kanchana Thilakarathna, Albert Zomaya (University of Sydney)

X-ray assurance for printed circuit boards (PCB) in AR/VR applications (XAP)
Navid Asadi (University of Florida)