A Secure Multi-Party Protocol for Sharing Valuable Information in Public Safety Networks

Public Safety Networks (PSNs) enable communication not only to warn the population about an imminent catastrophe, but also to coordinate teams during the crisis phase. As soon as authorities become aware of a crisis, they should organise a response just before the dissemination of warning messages to citizens in the crisis zone. Thus, it is important to prevent the leak of information before the communication to citizens. This paper explores the use of threshold cryptography for sharing valuable information (or secrets) in PSNs. The proposed protocol was designed to offer: (1) interoperability, (2) survivability, (3) security against adversary with specific goals (e.g., destroy the secrets). We implement the protocol in a wireless mesh network in order to demonstrate its efficiency.