Current ICT trends, such as Cloud computing, apps and services have led to dramatic changes in the economy and society. They enable significant improvements in efficiency and cost reduction. But they have also changed the clear and stable systems and organizational boundaries. They now have highly distributed structures that allow the flexible and rapid adaptation to new requirements and situations. These advantages increase the risks and potential threats. As a user of today’s apps and services, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand or even control who stores personal and business-critical data and processes for which purpose. This makes you as a user of such kinds of system uncertain and without confidence and you may become more conservative and lose the trust which may be a mismatch between your trust level and the trustworthiness of the system. The OPTET considers internet based systems, applications and services as socio-technical systems. It aims at offering secure and trusted cloud and service-based ICT, in order to increase the trustworthiness of such kinds of systems, and enabling consumers to make informed decisions about trustworthiness via evidence-based trustworthiness management.

To this end, the OPTET project puts an effort on understanding the trust perception by stakeholders, the type of evidence that builds trust, and the social and economic factors that drive trust; those perspectives need to be well investigated to lead the trustworthiness-based approach to success. Then, it offers specific methodologies, models and tools that cover the entire software lifecycle, in order to provide evidence-based trustworthiness processes and technologies for future socio-technical systems. OPTET emphasises on explicit trustworthiness evidence generated throughout the development process and continues monitoring and adaptation of running systems.

OPTET technologies will be validated through proof-of-concept prototypes and applications, and will be tested for user acceptance and for how effective they are in improving the trustworthiness of internet-based services.

The role of SSE in this project is leadership of WP3 on “Design of trustworthy socio-technical systems”. In this context SSE will contribute in the following way:

• Methodology and technology contributions to enhance system development towards producing trust evidence
• A monitoring infrastructure that allows observing the trustworthiness status through system operations and supports prompt reaction to incidents