Ubiquitous computing devices have become an essential part of our lives, as demonstrated by the popularity of “things” such as smartphones, public displays, smart tags, and the various wireless communication systems interconnecting them. Issues such as usability, reliability, security, privacy, and trust need to be addressed to ensure successful deployment and adoption of these technologies.

This survey-style book is part of a series of publications covering diverse yet connected fields such as pervasive, wearable, and location-aware computing; mixed reality; ambient, tangible, intelligent interfaces; smart environments; and software agents. This volume is the sixth in the series, focusing on issues related to security, reliability, and privacy in the increasingly important endeavor to achieve trustworthy ubiquitous computing. Each of the book’s 12 chapters is an independent paper in one of four focus areas: trust and context in ubiquitous computing environments; methods and concepts to enhance and ensure reliability in these environments; distributed attack detection and the secure access protocol; and access control and mobile payment. The chapters range from theoretical to practical. While some present interesting work on practical issues, others contain more specialized knowledge (for example, a discussion of the protocol details of micropayment systems, and the chapter on preserving privacy with a purpose-based privacy data graph). Several of the chapters deal with tangible everyday applications, including self-adaptive multidisplay environments and security issues in mobile banking.

Several important topics are missing. For example, there is not enough technical discussion about near field communication and how this technology could be attacked or protected, affecting its trustworthiness. There is also a lack of in-depth analysis of the impact of the proliferation of portable devices (in particular, smartphones and tablets) on security, privacy, and trust, and there is no mention of wearable computing.

Most chapters are very informative and should be understandable by nonexperts. I particularly enjoyed reading the chapters on potential security attacks using quick response codes, and on a security framework for mobile banking.

There is considerable variation in the quality of the papers. Some present more developed and mature works, whereas others seem to be at an early stage or without a clear direction on how a real contribution might be obtained from the work (for example, chapter 6). Furthermore, it is difficult to see why some of the chapters are included in this book, because they do not really address issues related to ubiquitous computing (for example, chapter 5), trust (for example, chapter 7), or both (for example, chapter 3).

As an alternative, Springer’s “Trust and Trustworthy Computing” series provides more balanced coverage of the issues [1,2].