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MIS: A Multi-Identifier Management and Resolution System in the Metaverse

Published: 27 March 2024 Publication History

Abstract

The metaverse gradually evolves into a virtual world containing a series of interconnected sub-metaverses. Diverse digital resources, including identities, contents, services, and supporting data, are key components of the sub-metaverse. Therefore, a Domain Name System (DNS)-like system is necessary for efficient management and resolution. However, the legacy DNS was designed with security vulnerabilities and trust risks due to centralized issues. Blockchain is used to mitigate these concerns due to its decentralized features. Additionally, it supports identity management as a default feature, making it a natural fit for the metaverse. While there are several DNS alternatives based on the blockchain, they either manage only a single type of identifiers or isolate identities from other sorts of identifiers, making it difficult for sub-metaverses to coexist and connect with each other. This article proposes a Multi-Identifier management and resolution System (MIS) in the metaverse, supporting the registration, resolution, and inter-translation functions. The basic MIS is portrayed as a four-tier architecture on a consortium blockchain due to its manageability, enhanced security, and efficiency properties. On-chain data is lightweight and compressed to save on storage while accelerating reading and writing operations. The resource data is encrypted based on the attributes of the sub-metaverse in the storage tier for privacy protection and access control. For users with decentralization priorities, a modification named EMIS is built on top of Ethereum. Finally, MIS is implemented on two testbeds and is available online as the open-source system. The first testbed consists of 4 physical servers located in the UK and Malaysia while the second is made up of 200 virtual machines (VMs) spread over 26 countries across all 5 continents on Google Cloud. Experiments indicate that MIS provides efficient reading and writing performance than the legacy DNS and other public blockchain-based workarounds including EMIS and Ethereum Name Service (ENS).

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications  Volume 20, Issue 7
July 2024
973 pages
EISSN:1551-6865
DOI:10.1145/3613662
  • Editor:
  • Abdulmotaleb El Saddik
Issue’s Table of Contents

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 March 2024
Online AM: 26 May 2023
Accepted: 02 April 2023
Revised: 30 March 2023
Received: 31 July 2022
Published in TOMM Volume 20, Issue 7

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Author Tags

  1. Metaverse
  2. blockchain
  3. Domain Name System
  4. identifier management

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  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • National Keystone Research and Development Program of China
  • Foshan Innovation Team
  • Basic Research Enhancement Program of China
  • China Environment for Network Innovation, GJFGW
  • SZFGW
  • Guangdong Province Research and Development Key Program
  • Guangdong Province Basic Research
  • Shenzhen Research Programs
  • Shenzhen Fundamental Research Program
  • ZTE Funding
  • Huawei Funding

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  • (2024)Heterogeneous Fusion and Integrity Learning Network for RGB-D Salient Object DetectionACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications10.1145/365647620:7(1-24)Online publication date: 15-May-2024
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