Towards trustworthy mobile social networking services for disaster response

Situational awareness is crucial for effective disaster management. However, obtaining information about the actual situation is usually difficult and time-consuming. While there has been some effort in terms of incorporating the affected population as a source of information, the issue of obtaining trustworthy information has not yet received much attention. Therefore, we introduce the concept of witness-based report verification, which enables users from the affected population to evaluate reports issued by other users. We present an extensive overview of the objectives to be fulfilled by such a scheme and provide a first approach considering security and privacy. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our approach in a simulation study. Our results highlight synergetic effects of group mobility patterns that are likely in disaster situations.