A Repository of Cognitive Attack Patterns for Extended-Reality Systems

Extended reality (XR) systems—including virtual, augmented, and mixed reality—are increasingly deployed across critical sectors such as healthcare, defense, manufacturing and energy. As these systems grow more cyber-critical, having access to structured and comprehensive information on attacks, vulnerabilities and defenses focusing on human cognition becomes essential for effectively assessing their security and resilience. Despite this, no centralized public resource currently exists that catalogs cognitive security threats specific to XR environments. To address this gap, this paper presents a public online knowledge base designed to facilitate the structured documentation, exploration, and sharing of XR-specific cognitive attacks, vulnerabilities, and mitigation strategies. The development of this resource followed a two-step methodology: first, identifying and defining the core entities involved in XR-related cognitive attacks; and second, modeling and implementing these entities into a relational database and user-friendly web interface. This platform is designed to aid XR product developers, researchers, and security professionals to report cognitive attack patterns and mitigations, and use knowledge base contents to analyze cognitive threats within XR systems.