Trust and confidence in open systems: Does security harmonize with mobility?

Mobile devices like organizers, mobile phones, notebooks, other personal appliances and equipment as well as traditional PCs and workstations inter-connected by wireless and other networks make up today's computing and communication environments (see [3], [1]). By now, mobile devices are in use for business work as well as for personal applications like private e-mails and electronic commerce. As mobile devices will play an important role in our social and business life, studying their trusted and condential usage in possibly untrusted and unconfidential environments is urgently required. The intention of this position paper is to stimulate discussion about the relevance of trust and confidence in the usage of mobile devices. In this sense we try to explain the characteristic situations of mobile devices, to explain their special needs, to give a short overview of some relevant OS in this area including the distinction to similar approaches in embedded systems, to focus on some selected needs in mobility and security (here Trust and Confidence), to present a short overview of the solution architecture for these needs within our research project. We then focus in this paper on the requirements the operating software of such systems should fulfill.