Display Leakage and Transparent Wearable Displays: Investigation of Risk, Root Causes, and Defenses

Transparent near-eye displays are shipping now for augmented reality applications. In addition to these applications, they promise a private display safe from shoulder surfing. Multiple researchers in the security and HCI communities have proposed systems building on the assumption these displays are private [14, 23, 24]. Unfortunately, this assumption is not always true. We find multiple shipping displays suffer from display leakage: an adversary who observes a user wearing the display can reconstruct the contents of the display from light leaked by the “outward-facing” part of the display. We propose defenses against display leakage and analyze them in context of a range of display designs.