Author(s)

J. K. Zao, K. T. Nguyen, Y. H. Wang, A. C. H. Lin, B. W. Wang & J. W. S. Liu

Abstract

Availability and timeliness of relevant information is of paramount importance during disaster response. Structural and situational information should be made available lavishly to decision makers, field workers, victims, even the general public provided that it would be possible to track down potential abuses. The trustworthy emergency information brokerage service (TIBS) described in this paper was developed based on such a conviction. This pervasive information flow control system offers information desensitization, flow traceability and use accountability services in two separate phases of disaster management: (1) in the preparatory phase, a prospective P-TIBS subsystem will provide information filtering and fusion tools that can help resource owners to desensitize organizational/ structural information and store them in a virtual repository deployed pervasively on many points of service (POS); (2) during the disaster responsive phase, a retrospective R-TIBS subsystem will lease the desensitized information and offer information flow traceability as well as use accountability services according to pre-specified information release and accountability policies. This accountability approach will be more scalable and responsive than the \“breakthe- glass” access control overriding mechanism available in many hospital information systems as it alleviates the need to authenticate individual users and authorize their emergency information access. This paper provides an overview of the TIBS system architecture and the enabling technology it employs. Keywords: disaster response, information accountability, authorization override.

Keywords

disaster response, information accountability, authorization override