From assessment to standardised benchmarking: Will it happen? What could we do about it?

Cost pressure, short time to market, and increased complexity are responsible for an evident increase of the failure rate of computing systems, while the cost of failures is growing rapidly, as a result of an unprecedented degree of dependence of our society on computing systems. The combination of these factors has created a dependability and security gap that is often perceived by users as a lack of trustworthiness in computer applications, and that is in fact undermining the network and service infrastructures that constitute the very core of the knowledge-based society.