Securing First Response Coordination with Dynamic Attribute-Based Encryption

Every minute saved in emergency management processes can save additional lives of affected victims. Therefore, an effective coordination of the incident reactions of mobile first responders is very important, especially in the face of rapidly changing situations of large scale disasters. However, tactical communication and messaging between the headquarter and mobile first responders, initiated for coordination purposes, has to meet a strong security requirement: it must preserve confidentiality in order to prevent malicious third parties from disrupting the reactions. This paper presents concepts to support the secure coordination of mobile first responders by providing means for secure ubiquitous tactical communication. Our concept harnesses cipher text-policy attribute-based encryption(CP-ABE) techniques. We extend current CP-ABE proposals by additionally taking into account dynamic factors: our proposed system is able to handle dynamic attributes, like current status of duty and location of mobile first responders, in a secure fashion. A flexible specification of receiver groups of tactical messages is possible, while end-to-end encryption in the messaging process is satisfied.