In the future, devices that communicate with each other or to the Internet will be common. This resulting “Internet of Things” promises to make life easier and connect services seamlessly. However, it also raises privacy and trust issues about communicating with so many devices. Can you trust the other devices that your devices talk to? Do you know what sort of information they want? Do you know how they will use this newly received information? How can you protect yourself and your information? The uTRUSTit projects attempts to answer these questions and create guidelines and systems that will allow everyone, regardless of ability, to determine the trust level of the devices around them. uTRUSTit bridges security, privacy, trust, universal design, usability, and accessibility.

NR’s contribution

The Norwegian Computing Center will work in many areas in the project. Our main objective is in defining the requirements for uTRUSTit. We will define the user scenarios and the personas that will be used in developing and testing the prototypes. In particular, we will look at the accessibility issues for special needs groups and incorporate them into the requirements. In addition, we will assist in elicting mental models for trust, assist in the user evaluation of prototypes and define how “things” can provide feedback about their security and privacy. Other activities include providing technical assistance, writing design guidelines, and serving as the ethics officer for the project.

Benefit for customers

The European Commission will have extra information about creating trustworthy information and communication technology infrastructure. The prototypes will use the latest technology, such as Near Field Communication (NFC), biophysical sensors, Virtual Reality (VR), and 3D technology and should provide information about how future devices should be designed. The design guidelines should aid designers and engineers in creating devices that can easily show security and privacy information.

Benefit for society

Users will be able to use devices that will aid them in deciding what information they are willing to share, which devices and services they are willing to share this with, and find out what devices in the area are requesting information. Since we will be including the needs of people with disabilities in our requirements, the guidelines and prototypes should be accessible to a much larger portion of the population.

Project results (preliminary)

All of our public deliverables thus far are available on the project website. We have also begun submitting papers to different workshops and conferences.