Learning-Based Reconstruction Attacks on Coordinate-Obfuscated Point Clouds

Abstract

Volumetric video based on point cloud representations enables immersive virtual and augmented reality applications but introduces significant challenges for efficient and secure content delivery. Prior work proposed a selective coordinate encryption framework for point clouds that encrypts only a subset of coordinates, reducing computational costs while visually degrading unauthorized content. However, it remains unclear whether the remaining unencrypted information is sufficient to enable content reconstruction. In this paper, we evaluate the robustness of selective coordinate encryption against machine learning-based reconstruction attacks. We consider an attacker with access to selectively encrypted point clouds attempting to recover encrypted coordinates without decryption by exploiting spatial and geometric correlations in the unencrypted data. We evaluate PointNet and Random Forest models under two encryption granularities: \texttt{X}, where all $X$ coordinates are encrypted, and \texttt{2X}, where every second $X$ coordinate is encrypted. Our results show that reconstructing fully encrypted $X$ coordinates remains challenging, whereas the \texttt{2X} scheme leaks sufficient information through neighboring coordinates to enable accurate reconstruction. These findings demonstrate that the security of selective coordinate encryption depends strongly on encryption granularity.