arXiv:2605.12927cs.CRcs.CV2026-05

通过头戴设备的发热图案,远程识别正在运行的VR应用。

ThermalTap: Passive Application Fingerprinting in VR Headsets via Thermal Side Channels

论文配图:ThermalTap: Passive Application Fingerprinting in VR Headsets via Thermal Side Channels
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用热成像捕捉头显外壳辐射,推断内部计算负载。
  • 室内10秒内识别准确率超90%,户外也达81%。
  • 无需接触设备,适合研究隐私泄露与安全防护者。

独立式虚拟现实(VR)头戴设备处理高度敏感的个人、专业和健康数据,但其对非接触式物理侧信道攻击的脆弱性尚未被充分探索。现有侧信道攻击通常需要恶意软件执行或物理访问外设,具有明显特征且可能被修复。本文提出 ThermalTap,首个被动式、非接触式的侧信道攻击,仅通过头显外壳发出的长波红外(LWIR)辐射即可实现对VR应用的指纹识别。将头显的热信号视为内部计算负载的高保真代理,ThermalTap可在无任何设备交互的情况下,于米级距离实现远程应用推断。为在真实环境中保持鲁棒性,系统结合商用热成像仪与多模态传感器套件(采集环境温度、湿度和气流),以消除环境噪声影响。我们在三款商用独立头显上测试了六款应用。在室内环境下,仅需10秒热成像数据,识别准确率即超过90%;在室外条件下,尽管存在环境变化,经更长时间会话观测后,多个应用仍可识别,最强案例达到81%准确率。研究结果表明,热辐射是沉浸式系统中一种基础且不可避免的隐私风险,揭示了一个绕过当前软件防护与物理访问控制的关键安全漏洞。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Standalone virtual reality (VR) headsets process highly sensitive personal, professional, and health-related data, yet their susceptibility to non-contact physical side channels remains largely unexplored. Existing side-channel attacks typically require malicious software execution or physical access to peripherals, making them conspicuous and potentially patchable. This paper introduces ThermalTap, the first passive, non-contact side-channel attack that fingerprints VR applications solely from the long-wave infrared (LWIR) radiation emitted by the headset chassis. By treating a headset's thermal signature as a high-fidelity proxy for internal computational workloads, ThermalTap enables remote application inference at meter-scale distances without any device interaction. To achieve robust performance in real-world settings, the system combines a commodity thermal camera with a multi-modal sensor suite (capturing ambient temperature, humidity, and airflow) to normalize environmental noise. We evaluate ThermalTap using six applications across three commercial standalone headsets. In indoor settings, ThermalTap identifies applications with over 90% accuracy using only 10 seconds of thermal camera data. Under outdoor conditions, with longer session-level observations, several applications remain identifiable despite environmental variability, with the strongest outdoor application reaching 81% accuracy. Our findings establish thermal radiation as a fundamental and unavoidable privacy risk for immersive systems, exposing a critical security gap that bypasses current software-level protections and physical access controls.

隐私安全侧信道攻击热成像VR安全

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