UC Irvine

Social VR apps, which enable users to interact in virtual spaces, are increasingly popular. Unfortunately, a large number of harassment incidents have taken place in these apps. To mitigate this issue, VR platforms and apps ask victims to report the incidents to analyze the reports, and if needed, punish the harassers. However, existing reporting solutions are ad hoc and cannot provide strong guarantees for integrity and authenticity of reports. Also, reports cannot always identify the harassers. To address these problems, we introduce Visor, a system solution for providing trustworthy and effective reports for social VR. To enable trustworthy reports, Visor incorporates a secure recorder on VR headsets to capture tamper- proof and irrefutable snapshots of visual content shown on the headset’s display. To enable effective reports, Visor introduces mandatory recording, a novel paradigm, which, alongside a search engine in an auditing server, facilitates identifying the harasser in a report. Our security analysis and evaluation with a VR headset prototype show that Visor is secure and adds small performance overhead. Moreover, using a 12-hour 99-user social VR experiment with automated users, we demonstrate that the mandatory recording paradigm helps an auditor find a harasser with 4 minutes of manual effort, on average.