NeTS: JUNO2: Resilient Disaster Communications in the Social-Media Era

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Effective and timely communication among citizens in need of help, first responders and others who are able to help during and in the aftermath of a disaster can affect outcomes dramatically. The integration of social media in daily lives has also dramatically changed how victims, volunteers, and first responders exchange information during this time. This project, a collaboration with Japan under the JUNO2, program, will develop a communication framework in disaster situations that enables critical information to be shared among several groups that use multiple modes of communication, including the use of social networks for hyper-local assistance from first responders and volunteers. But, security and trust are also important, because adversaries and malicious actors often seek to exploit a vulnerable situation. The communication framework will provide timely delivery of relevant information to first responders, victims and volunteers while at the same time enabling the participants to establish trust amongst each other and avoid having critical information forwarded through malicious nodes. This project seeks to have significant societal impact in the way public safety is managed and is equally applicable across all geographies, especially in the United States and Japan, both of which have experienced major natural disaster over the past few years. The project leverages two innovations for communication in disaster situations: a new graph-based dynamic naming framework integrated with an information-centric network layer for timely communication; and new approaches to usable security that provide trust relationships among participants based on establishing a trust chain originating from the pre-existing trust with first responders. Naming is one of the fundamental technologies underpinning modern communications (e.g., Domain Name System, or DNS). The researchers extend the capability of Information Centric Networks (ICN) to use rich graph structures for the namespace and develop a sophisticated, but light-weight, prefix matching for forwarding based on information across multiple layers. The use of namespace templates will enable easier adoption and dissemination of the namespace. The project will develop means to create trust relations in a timely manner between devices which are controlled by owners, leveraging both content and human information to ensure trustworthiness of a human/owner of the device. It will also examine whether human-based trustworthiness is meaningful in disasters and becomes a deterrent force against the malicious behavior of nodes and whether the trust management overheads on both systems and users are reasonable. A prototype framework/protocol stack will be installed at both the University of California-Riverside and Osaka University in Japan. Evaluation will be done on example scenarios that involve large numbers of victims and first responders. The PIs will work on standardizing communication for disaster management, including security and privacy. The artifacts developed in this project will be released as open source software to stimulate further experimental research in this important area.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.