About Trustworthy ICT

Trustworthy ICT is another term for IT Security, Information Security, e-Security mainly derived from the European Commission DG INFSO (Information Society), now DG CONNECT.

From the EC (European Commission) perspective, the term refers mainly to research activities for Pervasive and Trusted Network and Service  Infrastructures. According to the EC

"The current Internet architecture was not designed to cope with the wide variety, and the ever growing number of networked applications, business models, edge devices, networks and environments that it has now to support. Its structural limitations in terms of scalability, mobility, flexibility, security, trust and robustness of networks and services are increasingly being recognised world-wide."

Trustworthiness is a moral value considered to be a virtue. A trustworthy person is someone in whom we can place our trust and rest assured that the trust will not be betrayed.¹

In the ICT context, trustworthisness refers to ICT "that is secure, reliable and resilient to attacks and operational failures; guarantees quality of service; protects user data; ensures privacy and provides usable and trusted tools to support the user in his security management.²

This perspective opens opportunities for new developments and activities which could enhance the current and future infrastructures. 

For the ict industry, the term trustworthy ICT would mainly refer to ICT infrastructure, services and technologies that can be trusted. In this way it also allows for existing ict technologies, which are trusted today or could be trusted by enhancing the security and privacy measures.

The term trustworthy ICT for ICT industry encompasses both communications infrastructures (networks, network equipment, network security, wired and wireless, protocol enhancements, datacenters, cloud environments, the technology, social, business and legal context...), appliances (mobile and traditional computing equipment, internet of things, ... ), applications (software running on this equipment and on the network, both business applications controlling and maintaining business processes, industrial applications controlling machines and industrial processes, web sites, erp, crm, ...) and services (monitoring, business processing, data transformation, advisory, ...).

^{1. [Source: Wikipedia] ↩}

^{2. [Source: Workshop on measurability of trustworthiness, Brussels 03/09] ↩}