Enabling Trust between Humans and Machines

At the turn of the millennium, lack of trust was considered one of the major obstacles to developing successful ecommerce enterprises. It was realised that in order for the ecommerce to flourish and any online service to be successful, creating trust would become means to an end – a necessity. Furthermore, it was realised that understanding the real-world trust would be crucial to understanding the actual security of any transactions online — maybe even more so than creating the technological solutions for these transactions. Trust is one of the essential ingredients of the usability of security – a usability demand that is novel compared to “ordinary” usability measures. Trust forms the basis for all online transactions, and a trusting attitude towards computers in general may help put the user at ease when operating often complex systems – a description well suited to computer security applications. Trust is needed for using appliances that are critical security-wise. To enhance it, we need to understand what trust in general is made of – how users perceive it, and how this relates to the trust expressed by machines.