TY - INPR SN - 2576-5337 Y1 - 2024/09/17/ TI - From Embodied Abuse to Mass Disruption: Generative, Inter-Reality Threats in Social, Mixed-Reality Platforms AV - public N2 - Extended Reality (XR) platforms can expose users to novel attacks including embodied abuse and/or AI attacks-at-scale. The expanded attack surfaces of XR technologies may expose users of shared online platforms to psychological/social and physiological harms via embodied interactions with potentially millions of other humans or artificial humans, causing what we define as an inter-reality attack. The past twenty years have demonstrated how social and other harms (e.g. bullying, assault and stalking) can and do shift to digital social media and gaming platforms. XR technologies becoming more mainstream has led to investigations of ethical and technical consequences of these expanded input surfaces. However, there is limited literature that investigates social attacks, particularly toward vulnerable communities, and how AI technologies may accelerate generative attacks-at-scale. This paper employs human-centred research methods and a harms-centred Cybersecurity framework to co-design a testbed of socio-technical attack scenarios in XR social gaming platforms. It uses speculative fiction to further extrapolate how these could reach attacks-at-scale by applying generative AI techniques. It develops an Inter-Reality Threat Model to outline how actions in virtual environments can impact on the real-world. As AI capability continues to rapidly develop, this paper articulates the urgent need to consider a future where XR-AI attacks-at-scale could become commonplace. ID - discovery10197259 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3696015 N1 - This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher?s terms and conditions. JF - Digital Threats: Research and Practice PB - Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) A1 - Baldry, Moya Kate A1 - Happa, Jassim A1 - Steed, Anthony A1 - Smith, Simon A1 - Glencross, Mashhuda ER -