TRUST aWARE

The digital economy is important to individuals and society: diverse and important elements of social life—finances, healthcare, education and entertainment—take place online. Internet users are often exposed to a myriad of security and privacy threats when using digital services, and these threats have increased in scale and become more sophisticated over the years.

Traditional tools designed to combat cyber threats, such as anti-virus software, often fail to offer sufficient protection against this new scale of sophistication. As a result, cyber threats pose increasingly critical risks to privacy as well as to individual and societal wellbeing.

How can we improve security and privacy when using software?

The TRUST aWARE project aims to enhance people’s trust in software and the position of the EU’s digital market by protecting the security and privacy of internet users.

To achieve its objectives, TRUST aWARE will develop:

• User-friendly tools for people to better understand, prevent and respond to security and privacy threats.
• Collective intelligence tools for data protection agencies and computer emergency response teams (CERTs) to audit digital products and ensure that their security and privacy standards are in compliance with regulation.
• Certification methods to support developers creating software compliant with EU regulations and norms around ‘security and privacy’-by-design.

TRUST aWARE partners will co-create tools with key stakeholders, such as internet users, developers, and data protection agencies. The project aims to provide tools for all people and will pay special attention to vulnerable groups. For example, the project aims to protect minors against harmful content and support elderly people with limited digital skills to navigate online services safely and securely.

Trilateral will develop a security and privacy dashboard to empower individual users and organisations against security and privacy risks. This tool will help users understand risks based on their digital activity and will alert users when facing a threat.  The dashboard will also be used to train and assist users with taking preventative measures against these types of threats.

Trilateral will assess the ethical, socio-economic, and data protection issues that need to be considered in the development and deployment of the TRUST aWARE tools and for the ongoing compliance of the project.

Trilateral will generate policy recommendations to improve security and privacy tools. We will deliver a report to provide guidance for a responsible impact and application of any proposed standards or policies, in order to facilitate a responsible development of tools and to promote security and privacy.

For more information and updates visit the TRUST aWARE website and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.