A secure docking module for providing trust in crisis management incidents

In the SECRICOM project where seamless, interoperable crisis management communication is required, strong security and trust must be achieved under hostile physical and communication environment. Such environment centralized remote trusted third parties (TTP) are not easily deployed and can constitute single points of failure. In this paper, a local, distributed, attestation mechanism based on a smart card like hardware structure called Secure Docking Module (SDM) that is physically attached to each SECRICOM enabled communication device, is proposed. The SDM acts as an external security and trust arbiter attached to a host device that can provide secure storage and instill strong security and trust. In this paper, we elaborate on the above concept, present the SDM functionality and describe the necessary SDM hardware architecture and memory structure to realize this functionality. Our goal is to highlight the SDM usefulness as a local TTP capable of binding both user and its device to trust.