Omniscience for the Masses: New Threats in the Metaverse's Democratized World Creation

Abstract

Metaverse platforms increasingly derive their success from user-generated virtual worlds: self-contained social and interactive environments, which can be created by any ordinary user and scale to billions of visits. Platforms such as Roblox, Horizon Worlds, and VRChat now host millions of creator-built worlds that govern how users see, hear, and interact with one another. While this model enables rapid growth and creativity, it fundamentally delegates control over social interactions and world behavior to untrusted users. In this paper, we present the first systematic security and privacy assessment of metaverse world creators. We survey 25 platforms that support user-created worlds and analyze their world-creation capabilities. Guided by this analysis, we design and implement five novel attacks that exploit creator-provided tools to violate spatial, visual, and auditory constraints in immersive environments, enabling covert user surveillance and manipulation without software vulnerabilities or developer-level privileges. We further show that five previously-proposed attacks can be replicated using only standard world-creation features. Finally, we find that existing platform vetting, runtime protections, and creator policies are insufficient to mitigate malicious world-creator behavior, revealing a fundamental mismatch between users' privacy expectations and the powers granted to world creators.