Disappearing Security

The Ubiquitous Computing community has been touting the "disappearing computer" for some time now. What they mean is not that there should be no more computers. Rather, they believe that small, unabtrusive computers will be so ubiquitous (think smart wallpaper) that we won't even notice them.

In my talk, I will argue that security mechanisms need to "disappear", in the same sense, for two reasons: First, to secure the "disappearing computer" we need to come up with novel, unobrtusive security mechanisms. Second "disappearing" security can actually make things more secure, because it gives users less oppotunity to get things wrong. I will give a few examples of recent projects at PARC that have been following this notion of "disappearing security".