Secure Information Sharing on Support of Emergency Management

One of the most strategic component for an efficient and effective emergency management is the availability of an infrastructure on support of information sharing. Indeed, during emergency situations it is vital that the necessary information timely reaches the right person. Even if emergency management usually requires to bypass access control policies in place during the system normal operations, it is crucial that such process is temporary and controlled by proper emergency policies. To cope with these requirements, in this paper we present a system able to: 1) detect the events that cause the triggering of an emergency policy, 2) make immediately available to the authorized subjects information covered by the emergency policy. This is achieved by the definition of flexible emergency policies and by the use of a Complex Event Processing system on support of event monitoring and policy triggering. The paper also presents preliminary experiments on system overhead.