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Record W4414604198 · doi:10.1109/tifs.2025.3615515

Privacy-Preserving Authentication for Unlinkable Avatars in the Metaverse

2025· article· en· W4414604198 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicInnovation in Digital Healthcare Systems
Canadian institutionsConcordia UniversityUniversity of Victoria
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsMetaverseAnonymityAvatarAuthentication (law)Overhead (engineering)CryptographyService (business)Protocol (science)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The metaverse is a virtual world that mirrors real life, allowing users to engage in activities and access services without the constraints of time and space. In the metaverse, users can create one or more avatars that reflect their personal preferences, enabling them to participate in activities that match their tastes and needs. To protect users’ freedom and anonymity, it is imperative for metaverse platforms to support the creation of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">unlinkable</i> avatars. This ensures that the different avatars a user creates cannot be connected, keeping their virtual identities separate and reducing the risk of retaliation for their actions. In this paper, we propose an unlinkable avatar authentication scheme, UAVA, which leverages cryptographic group signatures to enable metaverse users to create and certify their avatars without interaction with service providers. These certified avatars can then be anonymously authenticated, ensuring unlinkability between multiple avatars belonging to the same user. UAVA maintains anonymity between users and their avatars, while allowing service providers to trace malicious avatars back to their users. We formally define and prove the security properties of UAVA, and implement the protocol using socket programming, and report on its cryptographic overheads. We also evaluate its cryptographic overhead and compare it to related protocols in terms of efficiency, security, and scalability.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.792
Threshold uncertainty score0.646

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.040
GPT teacher head0.380
Teacher spread0.340 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it