Information Flow in Disaster Management Systems

By Achim D. Brucker and Dieter Hutter.

Collaborations between organizations in the public sector, e.g., fire brigades, polices, military units, is often done via liaison officers. A liaison officer liaises between two organizations by providing a single point of contact and ensuring the efficient communication and coordination of their activities. Usually an organization embeds a liaison officer in another organization to provide face-to-face coordination. Liaison officers demand special requirements to the security mechanism of the IT infrastructure of the organization that act as host for a liaison officer.

This holds, in particular, for Disaster Management Information Systems (DMIS). Such systems need, on the one hand, to support various ways of communication in a flexible and ad hoc manner. On the other hand, these systems need to protect, by law, the leakage of sensitive data.

In this paper, we present a novel mechanism, based on role-based access control (RBAC), for supporting the flexible and secure information exchange between organizations using liaison officers. Our mechanism enables liaison officers to decide on their own authority which information they wants share with their home organizations while allowing the host organization to limit the access of liaisons officers to their system in a fine-grained manner.

Keywords:
Disaster Management, Information Flow, Access Control, Liaison Officer

Please cite this work as follows:
A. D. Brucker and D. Hutter, “Information flow in disaster management systems,” in International conference on availability, reliability and security (ARES), Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society, 2010, pp. 156–163. doi: 10.1109/ARES.2010.107. Author copy: https://logicalhacking.com/publications/brucker.ea-information-2010/

BibTeX
@InCollection{ brucker.ea:information:2010,
  author    = {Achim D. Brucker and Dieter Hutter},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Availability, Reliability and
               Security (ARES)},
  language  = {USenglish},
  title     = {Information Flow in Disaster Management Systems},
  year      = {2010},
  areas     = {security},
  publisher = {IEEE Computer Society },
  address   = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA },
  pages     = {156--163},
  isbn      = {978-0-7695-3965-2},
  doi       = {10.1109/ARES.2010.107},
  abstract  = {Collaborations between organizations in the public sector,
               e.g., fire brigades, polices, military units, is often done
               via liaison officers. A liaison officer liaises between two
               organizations by providing a single point of contact and
               ensuring the efficient communication and coordination of their
               activities. Usually an organization embeds a liaison officer
               in another organization to provide face-to-face coordination.
               Liaison officers demand special requirements to the security
               mechanism of the IT infrastructure of the organization that
               act as host for a liaison officer.
               
               This holds, in particular, for Disaster Management Information
               Systems (DMIS). Such systems need, on the one hand, to support
               various ways of communication in a flexible and ad hoc manner.
               On the other hand, these systems need to protect, by law, the
               leakage of sensitive data.
               
               In this paper, we present a novel mechanism, based on
               role-based access control (RBAC), for supporting the flexible
               and secure information exchange between organizations using
               liaison officers. Our mechanism enables liaison officers to
               decide on their own authority which information they wants
               share with their home organizations while allowing the host
               organization to limit the access of liaisons officers to their
               system in a fine-grained manner.},
  keywords  = {Disaster Management, Information Flow, Access Control,
               Liaison Officer},
  note      = {Author copy: \url{https://logicalhacking.com/publications/brucker.ea-information-2010/}},
  pdf       = {https://logicalhacking.com/publications/brucker.ea-information-2010/brucker.ea-information-2010.pdf},
}