Secricom

Seamless Communication for Crisis Management

SECRICOM is a collaborative research project of Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) aiming at development of a reference security platform for EU crisis management operations with two essential ambitions:

• Solve or mitigate problems of contemporary crisis communication infrastructures (Tetra, GSM, Citizen Band, IP) such as poor interoperability of specialized communication means, vulnerability against tapping and misuse, lack of possibilities to recover from failures, inability to use alternative data carrier and high deployment and operational costs.
• Add new smart functions to existing services which will make the communication more effective and helpful for users. Smart functions will be provided by distributed IT systems based on an agents’ infrastructure.Achieving these two project ambitions will allow creating a pervasive and trusted communication infrastructure fulfilling requirements of crisis management users and ready for immediate application.

Project objectives

In September 2006 the European Security Research Advisory Board (ESRAB) published a report setting the European security research agenda that contained basic requirements on new communication infrastructures.They can be summarized as follows:

• Secure in terms of protection against tapping and external intrusion.
• Trusted in the sense of behaving as expected by meaning minimising the threats for failure to be a basis for creating emergency solutions.
• Providing enhanced connectivity between various networks and devices.
• Transmission of various formats of information such as data, multimedia (voice, picture, video sequences, etc.), localisation data, etc.
• Advanced search functions embedded in infrastructure itself.

The goals of the SECRICOM project are based on these requirements of future users of the system. The project will create an infrastructure of a brand new quality, which was impossible until now, due to the state of maturity of various technologies used and the lack of cooperation between specialists in different communication areas.

Background

Secricom infrastructure

SECRICOM will bring interconnectivity of PTT traffic between different networks. In addition to mobile handsets, the Push-to-Talk service will be complemented with fixed PC applications acting as PTT clients connected to the mobile operator. SECRICOM is to be designed for coordinating and managing large variable groups instantly. The background IP being brought to SECRICOM provides the basis for delivering managed end-to-end IP network services by making use of dynamically changing policy based routing and communication bearer specific interfaces with optimized bridging of routing protocols. The solution needs to be able to seamlessly support different user traffic (with different QoS and security requirements) over different communication bearers (with a range of capabilities), depending on the end user environment (e.g. disaster relief with ad hoc comms, mobile working with dynamically changing access to communications service provider networks). It needs to be dynamic (recognising that differing sets of bearers may be available at any particular time) and configurable (to enable incremental technology insertion as new solutions are rolled out).

The end to end service will support any SECRICOM user with any connections to any of the selected networks, as well as provide network access to the SECRICOM Control centre that will identify security issues with the provided end to end, multi bearer IP network and user services. SECRICOM will deliver a secure and reliable platform for heterogeneous communication infrastructures among mobile communication devices at the lowest level to the upper layer formed by distributed IT systems. Security is addressed in most of the distributed systems, such as grid systems, service oriented systems (SOA) and distributed agent systems.

It will provide a security solution for existing inexpensive easily accessible communication devices (Smartphones, PDAs, Laptops, etc.) which will be simply plugged in, preserving sensitive information, arranging authentication and encryption process during the communication.

Publications

Proceedings
2010	Stefan Kraxberger - "A Scalable Secure Overlay Framework for Heterogeneous Embedded Systems" - Proceedings of the 35th Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (Note: to appear)
2010	Stefan Kraxberger, Günther Lackner, Udo Payer - "WLAN Location Determination without Active Client Collaboration" - IWCMC '10: Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing
2010	Stefan Kraxberger, Daniel Hein, Peter Danner - "Secure Multi-Agent System for Multi-Hop Environments" - MMM-ACNS 2010: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Mathematical Methods, Models and Architectures for Computer Network Security
2009	Daniel Hein, Ronald Tögl - "An Autonomous Attestation Token to Secure Mobile Agents in Disaster Response" - Security and Privacy in Mobile Information and Communication Systems First International ICST Conference, MobiSec 2009, Turin, Italy, June 3-5, 2009, Revised Selected Papers
2009	Stefan Kraxberger, Udo Payer - "Security Concept for Peer-to-Peer Systems" - IWCMC '09: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing
2009	Stefan Kraxberger, Udo Payer - "Secure Routing Approach for Unstructured P2P Systems" - SECUREWARE '09: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Emerging Security Information, Systems and Technologies
2009	Udo Payer, Stefan Kraxberger, Peter Holzer - "IPv6 Label Switching on IEEE 802.15.4" - SENSORCOMM '09: Proceedings of the 2009 Third International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications

Article
2010	Daniel Hein, Ronald Tögl, Stefan Kraxberger - "An Autonomous Attestation Token to Secure Mobile Agents in Disaster Response" - Security and communication networks (Volume: 3)
2010	Peter Danner, Daniel Hein - "A Trusted Computing Identity Collation Protocol to Simplify Deployment of New Disaster Response Devices" - Journal of universal computer science [Elektronische Ressource] (Volume: 16 9)

Tech report
2009	Daniel Hein, Peter Danner, Apostolos Fournaris, Martin Liebl - "SECRICOM WP5 Functional specification of the Secure Docking Module"
2009	Ivan Kočiš, Ahmed Aldabbagh, Oscar Lázaro, Oscar López, Mikel Uriarte, Daniel Hein, Peter Danner, Tomasz Miroslaw, Monika Świech, Wojciech Dymowski, Ladislav Hluchý, Branislav Ŝimo, Zoltán Balogh, Vladimir Hudek, Aurel Machalek, Apostolos Fournaris, Jacques Fournier - "Secricom WP 2 Analysis of external and internal system requirements"
2009	Branislav Ŝimo, Zoltán Balogh, Daniel Hein, Peter Danner, Oscar López, Mikel Uriarte, Vladimír Hudek - "SECRICOM WP4 Security requirements and specification for docking station module"

Presentation
2009	Daniel Hein - "An Autonomous Attestation Token to Secure Mobile Agents in Disaster Response" (The First International ICST Conference on Security and Privacy in Mobile Information and Communication Systems (MobiSec 2009), Turin, 05.06.09)
2009	Peter Danner - "A Trusted Computing Identity Collation Protocol To Simplify Deployment of New Disaster Response Devices" (4th European Trusted Infrastructure Summerschool (ETISS) 2009, Graz, 29.08.09)