A Trustless Architecture of Blockchain-enabled Metaverse

2025-04-30 0 0 948.6KB 8 页 10玖币

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Minghui Xua,Yihao Guoa,Qin Hub,Zehui Xiongc,Dongxiao Yuaand Xiuzhen Chenga,∗

aSchool Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, Qingdao, China

bDepartment of Computer and Information Science, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, USA

cInformation Systems Technology and Design Pillar, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore

ARTICLE INFO

Keywords:

Metaverse

Blockchain

Edge Computing

Trust

ABSTRACT

Metaverse has rekindled human beings’ desire to further break space-time barriers by fusing the vir-

tual and real worlds. However, security and privacy threats hinder us from building a utopia. A

metaverse embraces various techniques, while at the same time inheriting their pitfalls and thus ex-

posing large attack surfaces. Blockchain, proposed in 2008, was regarded as a key building block

of metaverses. it enables transparent and trusted computing environments using tamper-resistant de-

centralized ledgers. Currently, blockchain supports Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-fungible

Tokens (NFT) for metaverses. However, the power of a blockchain has not been suﬃciently exploited.

In this article, we propose a novel trustless architecture of blockchain-enabled metaverse, aiming to

provide eﬃcient resource integration and allocation by consolidating hardware and software compo-

nents. To realize our design objectives, we provide an On-Demand Trusted Computing Environment

(OTCE) technique based on local trust evaluation. Speciﬁcally, the architecture adopts a hypergraph

to represent a metaverse, in which each hyperedge links a group of users with certain relationship.

Then the trust level of each user group can be evaluated based on graph analytics techniques. Based

on the trust value, each group can determine its security plan on demand, free from interference by ir-

relevant nodes. Besides, OTCEs enable large-scale and ﬂexible application environments (sandboxes)

while preserving a strong security guarantee.

1. Introduction

The concept of metaverse was originated from Snow Cash,

a 1992 science ﬁction novel by Neal Stephenson. The word

“metaverse” is a portmanteau of “meta” (meaning transcend-

ing) and “verse” (abbreviation of the universe). In 2021,

metaverse became popular overnight since it rekindled peo-

ple’s hope of building an ideal virtual society where human

beings are tightly connected. Big companies then started to

commit to developing metaverse software, e.g., Meta Hori-

zon Workroom [13], Microsoft Mesh [29], and NVIDIA Om-

niverse [30]. In fact, human beings have undergone a long

history of building tight bonds and shortening the distance

among themselves, from ancient times to the current infor-

mation age. Nevertheless, constructing a metaverse is a chal-

lenging task, though exciting and stirring.

Before metaverse is pushed to forefront, many eﬀorts

have been made, including Virtual Reality (VR)/Augmented

Reality (AR), 3D virtual world, and online video games [10].

However, how to implement a true metaverse is still unclear

and controversial to developers, even though they have con-

structed a number of relevant tools and established a com-

mon goal of fusing virtual and reality. The major concerns

about metaverse are related to its feasibility and safety since

a metaverse can consume a tremendous amount of computa-

tional resources and require a safe and trusted environment.

Based on our investigations, we summarize the key issues of

∗Corresponding author

mhxu@sdu.edu.cn (M. Xu); yhguo@mail.sdu.edu.cn (Y. Guo);

qinhu@iu.edu (Q. Hu); zehui_xiong@sutd.edu.sg (Z. Xiong);

dxyu@sdu.edu.cn (D. Yu); xzcheng@sdu.edu.cn (X. Cheng)

ORCID(s): 0000-0003-3675-3461 (M. Xu); 0000-0003-3266-6002 (Y.

Guo); 0000-0002-8847-8345 (Q. Hu); 0000-0002-4440-941X (Z. Xiong);

0000-0001-6835-5981 (D. Yu); 0000-0001-5912-4647 (X. Cheng)

metaverse as follows.

Open-ended, Blocky

Reality, Locality Metaverse

expected

Minecraft

Roblox

Second Life

Pok ƴ𝑒mon Go

H. Workroom

Omniverse

Decentraland

M.Mesh

Cryptovoxels

Figure 1: The roadmap of the metaverse projects.

First, current infrastructures can hardly support building

a metaverse that meets our expectations. Metaverse applica-

tions currently exhibit a tradeoﬀ between reality and open-

ness as shown in Figure 1. Resource shortage and improper

allocation lead to the sacriﬁce of either openness or real-

ity. For example, the resource in Minecraft [28] is mainly

used to improve the openness for users but sacriﬁces the

reality (users can only live in a “blocky” world). Hence

there is an urgent demand for an eﬃcient metaverse archi-

tecture, which can suﬃciently utilize the existing computa-

tional resources. Second, security and privacy threats hinder

the building of a practical metaverse platform. For example,

at the beginning of 2022, the metaverse company Meta was

sued for illegally collecting facial information without users’

consent [22]. Besides, the attack surface of a metaverse is

very largely due to its diversity [33]. Additionally, a meta-

verse needs to integrate various technologies whose pitfalls

are also naturally inherited. For instance, blockchain, pro-

posed in 2008, has been regarded as the key building block

Minghui Xu et al.: Preprint submitted to Elsevier Page 1 of 8

arXiv:2210.12655v2 [cs.CR] 16 Dec 2022

A Trustless Architecture of Blockchain-enabled Metaverse

of a metaverse. Blockchain enables transparent and trusted

computing environments using a tamper-resistant decentral-

ized ledger; however, the functions of a blockchain are lim-

ited, as one can see that it is only used to build Decentral-

ized Finance (DeFi) or Non-Fungible Token (NFT) nowa-

days. Besides, using blockchain in a metaverse can consume

a large amount of resources and incur long latency.

In this paper, we attempt to address the aforementioned

shortcomings with a novel metaverse architecture. Our con-

tributions are highlighted as follows:

•We propose an architecture of blockchain-based meta-

verse by consolidating hardware and software compo-

nents, aiming at providing eﬃcient resource integra-

tion and allocation. The architecture presents detailed

collaborations among diﬀerent modules.

•We formally deﬁne a local trust model (LTM) to de-

pict a metaverse as a weighted hypergraph. Using this

model, it is feasible to evaluate the trust among each

group of metaverse users and provide it with an appro-

priate computing environment according to the trust

value.

•To enhance security and privacy of a metaverse, we

propose On-Demand Trusted Computing Environment

(OTCE) to support application environments with vari-

able scalability, which can provide a strong security

guarantee using blockchain as an underlying technol-

ogy.

2. Related Works and Motivation

Since metaverse is a young ﬁeld, we summarize the ef-

fort from both industry and academia made in the past two

years.

2.1. Metaverse in Industry

Facebook oﬃcially announced that its company name

was changed to Meta [22] in 2021, which marks that it has

identiﬁed metaverse as an important direction for future. Hori-

zon Workroom [13], launched by Meta, can provide people

with immersive virtual meeting rooms. Users in any physical

location with an Oculus Quest 2 helmet can join a Horizon

Workroom and experience virtual whiteboard control and

ﬁle sharing. Microsoft Mesh [29] is a platform supported

by Azure. It adopts technologies including blockchain, arti-

ﬁcial intelligence (AI), and extended reality (XR) to accom-

plish virtual collaborations and spatially aware design re-

views. NVIDIA presented Omniverse [30], which is a meta-

verse system focusing on 3D simulation and digital twins.

The Omniverse ecosystem includes components such as Om-

niverse Connect, Nucleus, and RTX, among which RTX can

provide Omniverse with powerful computing powers.

In the ﬁeld of 3D games, Roblox [7] proposed eight key

characteristics of a metaverse, i.e., identity, friends, immer-

sion, anywhere, diversity, low latency, economy, and civi-

lization. Second Life [19] is a free 3D virtual world where

users can create and connect with others using voice and text.

Linden Dollar as the virtual currency of Second Life can be

exchangeable with real-world currency. Minecraft [28] is

an online 3D game that allows users to create virtual worlds

based on their creativity. Users can enter a game through VR

devices, e.g., Oculus Rift, thereby enhancing the sense of

immersion. Pokémon Go [6] is a location-based AR game,

in which players can use mobile devices (iPhone and An-

droid devices) to travel between the real world and the virtual

world.

Some projects introduce blockchain to the metaverses

they build. Decentraland is a decentralized VR platform

based on Ethereum, in which users can obtain beneﬁts by

creating, experiencing, and developing NFT. Cryptovoxels [8]

is a virtual world built on Ethereum where players can buy,

sell and construct virtual art galleries, shops, etc.

2.2. Metaverse in Academia

Jon Radoﬀ [27] presented a metaverse architecture with

the following seven layers: experience, discovery, creator

economy, spatial computing, decentralization, human inter-

face, and infrastructure. CUHKSZ [12] is a university cam-

pus prototype implemented with the FISCO-BCOS consor-

tium blockchain. CUHKSZ supports tokens, Distributed Au-

tonomous Organizations (DAO), and trading. The creators

also put forward a number of critical challenges and thought-

ful questions about developing a metaverse. Van et al. [32]

proposed a new digital twin scheme, which adopts mobile

edge computing (MEC) and ultra-reliable and low latency

communications (URLLC) technologies to help metaverse

improve reliability and reduce communication latency. Nair et

al. [24] presented an 𝜀-diﬀerential privacy framework to im-

prove the security and privacy of VR devices, which enables

users to maximize privacy while minimizing usability im-

pact when using VR devices to participate in the metaverse.

In [23], Nair et al. further explored privacy risks in the meta-

verse through an experiment with 30 researchers.

In addition to the works mentioned above, there also ex-

ist a few surveys and reviews, which intend to summarize

the eﬀort made toward metaverse from various perspectives.

Dionisio et al. [10] pointed out four directions of develop-

ing a metaverse, namely immersive realism, ubiquity of ac-

cess and identity, interoperability, and scalability. Kye et

al. [18] discussed the opportunities and challenges of meta-

verse in education. Damar et al. [9] extracted relevant in-

formation about the development of metaverse from the past

three decades. Park et al.[25] classiﬁed and analyzed the

current metaverse schemes from ﬁve perspectives, i.e., hard-

ware, software, contents, user interaction, implementations,

and applications. In [33], Wang et al. investigated the prob-

lems of the current major metaverse solutions from the per-

spective of security and privacy. The focus of Xu et al.[36]

is on an edge-enabled metaverse. Yang et al.[40] studied the

important role that AI and blockchain play in metaverse.

2.3. Motivation

According to the above description on the most related

works, one can see that metaverse in industry is still in its

Minghui Xu et al.: Preprint submitted to Elsevier Page 2 of 8

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