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Currently everybody’s everyday and professional activity is getting more and more dependent on the use of computers and software. So, there is a evidently a growing need in trustworthy computing, since “cyber-attacks” may happen every day, hour, or minute, and can lead to fatal consequences, from a crush of some data or the whole computer system, till a fault of some company or even the death of a live organism somewhat controlled by a computer. The book (Schneider, 1999) considered to be a classical book on trustworthy computing defines this term as follows: “Trustworthiness is assurance that a system deserves to be trusted – that it will perform as expected despite environmental disruptions, human and operator error, hostile attacks, and design and implementation errors. Trustworthy systems reinforce the belief that they will continue to produce expected behavior and will not be susceptible to subversion.”
The concept of trustworthy computing is wide and based on a number of scientific, engineering, business, and human factors. This article primarily focuses on trustworthy software development.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Business Integrity: The prompt reaction of the software product team to users’ questions and the bugs found, especially those related to security, privacy, and reliability issues, and correctness of business principles of the software product development company.
Phishing: Stealing from users their confidential data (like logins and passwords) by deceptive alert email messages and Web sites.
Denial of Service: A kind of attack by generating a lot of requests to a server to cause its fault.
Privacy: The ability of the software product to keep private all confidential data by the users.
Trustworthy Computing: An approach to computer software and hardware development and use aimed to enable security, reliability, privacy, and business integrity of the computing process; also an initiative by Microsoft (2002) AU11: The in-text citation "Microsoft (2002)" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. .
Reliability: The ability of a software product to enable its expected functionality under certain conditions during a certain period of time.
Pharming: Redirecting users to malicious Web sites aimed to steal their confidential information.
Security Development Lifecycle: A novel scheme of software lifecycle by Microsoft based on taking care of software product security during all the lifecycle from its early stages.
Security: The ability of the software product to be protected from attacks.