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First Responder System:

A Mission-Critical Communication Architecture with Integrated QoS and QoP

People

• Professor Klara Nahrstedt: Principle Investigator
• Ying Huang: Ph.D. student
• Wenbo He: Graduated

Introduction

In case of emergency such as Hurricane Katrina and Terroristic Attack 911, nationwide efforts to handle such disasters are in growing demand. The First Response system is designed to improve emergency response operations. The organizations involved in the disaster relief include, but are not limited to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Emergency Medical Service (EMS), Law Enforcement (LE) Agency, fire departments, public health service agencies, and other mutual aid groups. There are hundreds of the federal agencies which take part in to handle emergencies and disasters. Considering the federal, state, local and tribal governments and disaster relief agencies, we can tell that the total number of organizations involved in emergency accidents is huge. Persistent and effective communication and cooperation among agencies are important factors to guarantee the safety of people and property. Even in case of day-to-day routines, 90 percent of the activities are made up of multi-agency support or backup, let alone task force and mutual aid in large disasters and terrorism. Within a multi-domain network as such, interoperation across organization boundaries and with QoS requirements is necessary. To facilitate cooperation as well as protect the security and privacy within each domain, secure interoperability in a multi-domain environment is in crucial.

Challenges

• Heterogeneous Networks:

  The public safety communication infrastructure is heterogeneous in a number of ways:

  1. Different type of networks, such as backbone, WLAN, ad-hoc, satellite, etc.
  2. Different physical and logical networks, such as frequency bands, virtual networks, etc.
  3. Different administrative domains, for example private vs. public, diverse agencies, etc.
  4. Different networking protocols including standards and proprietary, such as TDMA, CDMA, OFDM and so on.
     
     
• Trust And Key Management

  Mobility renders difficulty in trust management in Incident Area Network (IAN), which is a mobile wireless ad hoc network created to handle incidents. In IAN, many devices and personnel from different administrative domains work together. The topology of IAN is changed dynamically. None of a single node is able to perform trust management, since none of a single domain is able to identify all the devices and personnel from different administrative domains in IAN. Cryptography is a powerful mechanism for privacy protection and membership management. Cryptographic mechanisms rely on secure key setup and management. However, in mobile ad hoc network environment, key management is heavily depends on trust relationship between two end nodes.

• Vulnerability of Wireless Channels

  In wireless network, messages can be eavesdropped and interferenced, and fake messages can be injected into the network. In IAN, wireless channels are vulnerable to intentional or unintentional attacks. Attacks in wireless ad hoc networks on routing disruption are very common. By spoofing, altering, or replaying routing information, adversaries may be able to create routing loops, attract or repel network traffic, extend or shorten source routes, generate false error messages, partition the network, increase end-to-end latency, etc. Therefore, it is difficult to build the secure communication tunnel on top of wireless channels.

• Mobility
  1. Node mobility
  2. Functionality Mobility
  3. Data Mobility
     
     
• Membership management and Dynamic Network Scale

  In First Responder system, the boundaries between agencies are obscure by network sharing. It is possible for small number personnel from agency A to borrow some network resources from networks belonging to agency B when the personnel number of agency A in the incident area are not enough to form a network or the agency A’s network suffer from great overloading. Thus the network size is unpredictable. Some mechanisms on global identity authentication and billing are indispensable for membership management. Another headache is that source routing protocol in wire-less network may bring very large overhead when network size is large. Thus it is necessary to split the network into multiple networks. For example, when more and more people from agency A comes, it is better for them to form a new private network for good quality and privacy reason. When does this split happens and who will participate needs investigated. Thus controllability and scalability are very important factors in our protocol design.

Our Work

• Trust Management

	1. Mobile-Herald: Alert propagation   Trust info propagation, robust to slander attacks + Mobility assisted alert propagation + Quorum-based voting
	2. SMOCK: Scalable public key management scheme   Scalable; dynamic membership;  small memory; resilience to compromise + Combinatorics to reduce key space (key sharing) + Instant message authentication
	3. Containment of false broadcast injection  Filter out false broadcasts close to originator + Probabilistic authentication + Context-aware adaptation

• Mobility Model: COPRS: Event-driven mobility model

Mobility Elements	CORPS Mobility Framework

Publications

Conference and Workshop

[09] Ying Huang, Wenbo He, Klara Nahrstedt, "ChainFarm: A Novel Authentication Protocol for High-rate Any Source Probabilistic Broadcast" [PDF], MASS 2009

[09] Ying Huang, Yan Gao, Wenbo He, Klara Nahrstedt, "Optimizing File Retrieval in Delay-Tolerant Content Distribution Community" [PDF], ICDCS 2009

[08] Ying Huang, Wenbo He, Klara Nahrstedt, Whay C. Lee, "CORPS: EVENT-DRIVEN MOBILITY MODEL FOR FIRST RESPONDERS IN INCIDENT SCENE" [PDF], MILCOM 2008

[08] Ying Huang, Wenbo He, Klara Nahrstedt, Whay C. Lee, "Incident Scene Mobility Analysis" [PDF] , 2008 IEEE Conference on Technologies for Homeland Security: Enhancing Critical Infrastructure Dependability

[08] Ying Huang, Wenbo He, Klara Nahrstedt, Whay C. Lee, "DoS-Resistant Broadcast Authentication Protocol with Low End-to-end Delay" [PDF], 2nd IEEE Workshop on Mission-Critical Networking, in conjunction with IEEE Infocom 2008

[07] Wenbo He, Ying Huang, Klara Nahrstedt, Whay C. Lee, "SMOCK: A Self-contained Public Key Management Scheme for Mission-critical Wireless Ad Hoc Networks" [PDF], 5th Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom'07), White Plains, NY, March 2007. (acceptance rate 9.6%)

[07] Ying Huang, Wenbo He, Klara Nahrstedt, Whay C. Lee, "Requirements and System Architecture Design Consideration for First Responder Systems" [PDF], 2007 IEEE Conference on Technologies for Homeland Security: Enhancing Critical Infrastructure

Technical Report

[07] Wenbo He, Ying Huang, Klara Nahrstedt, and Whay C. Lee, "Dandelion: Mobility-assisted Reliable Message Propagation Protocol in MANETs," Technical report of Department of Computer Science in UIUC, UIUCDCS-R-2007-2924

[07] Wenbo He, Ying Huang, Klara Nahrstedt, and Whay C. Lee, "MobiHerald: Alert Propagation in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks," Technical report of Computer Science Department in UIUC, UIUCDCS-R-2007-2825

Journal Article

[08] Wenbo He, Ying Huang, Ravishankar Sathyam, Klara Nahrstedt, and Whay C. Lee, "SMOCK: A Scalable Method of Cryptographic Key Management for Mission-critical Wireless Ad Hoc Networks," IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (to appear).

Funding Agency