An Infrastructure for Emergency Communications
When a widespread health crisis strikes, like an epidemic disease or a bio-terrorist attack, a reliable emergency communication system is of the utmost importance for connecting a large number of crucial first responders and health care workers quickly and expediently. To be useful, such a system needs to be compatible with existing messaging infrastructure, such as email, IM, and telephones. It must be immune to spammers and intruders who could use the system to create false alarms and spread panic. It must be inexpensive, and it must not require the use of large amounts of scarce hardware, software, and personnel resources on the part of cooperating organizations. And the system's performance must scale to a large number of users sharing crucial information in an emergency situation.

This project's goal is to develop and prototype a scalable, decentralized emergency communications system which relies on existing, widely-used messaging infrastructure such as email. Our approach is to disseminate emergency information to users based on their attributes (such as role in the organization, subscribed interests, etc.). This work will be based on Attribute Based Messaging (ABM), which was developed as part of AMPol, an NCASSR-funded project from Year Three. ABM enables email senders to dynamically create a list of recipients based on their attributes as inferred from an enterprise attribute database. The possibility of extending this design to use other messaging infrastructures such as instant messaging (IM), short messaging service (SMS) or texting, and voice over IP (VoIP) will also be explored.
 
Project Leads
Carl Gunter, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Himanshu Khurana, NCSA
Rakesh Bobba, NCSA

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The National Center for Advanced Secure Systems Research NCASSR) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) is a multi-institutional cybersecurity research team. NCASSR focuses basic and applied research necessary to develop next generation information security technologies that address national cybersecurity needs. NCASSR is led by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and supported by funding from the Office of Naval Research (ONR).


SELS 0.7 released
Secure Email List Services (SELS) is an open source software for creating and developing secure email list services among user communities.
 
Strong community engagement strengthens cybersecurity research and development
NCASSR-supported exploratory research at NCSA and elsewhere has sparked additional external funding and development opportunities as well as successful deployment and adoption by users ranging from the defense sector to state law enforcement to the utilities industry.
 
NCASSR Collaborator Goes To Washington
Carl Gunter, a professor in the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science and a project lead on NCASSR-supported work involving adaptive, secure messaging, recently spoke to an audience of congressional staffers and lobbyists on Capitol Hill regarding ways to address a variety of critical cybersecurity issues in areas such as healthcare and energy distribution.