PITO: A children-friendly interface for security tools

Current Operating Systems and user applications provide several security tools that are designed to automatically handle a set of well-known events and threats, whereas they inform the user that something potentially dangerous is happening an ask her to take a decision. Since we believe that this learning process could have a relevant educational value for children, we present, in this paper, an interface for Security tools featured by operating systems, user applications or third party security suites. The interface, that has been designed as "Pito": a digital pet, is purposed to allow children that use computer to be softly introduced in security issues that usually occur when navigating the Internet. Alerts notified by the underlying security tools are mapped as some simple events into the Pito's world. These events change the state of Pito and, according to the current state, the young user is asked to do some action in order to keep Pito's sane and happy, that is to keep safe the computer. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.