Secricom
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SECRICOM (Seamless Communication for Crisis Management) is a collaborative research project of Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) aiming at development of a reference security platform for EU crisis management operations with two essential ambitions:
- Solve or mitigate problems of contemporary crisis communication infrastructures (Tetra, GSM, Citizen Band, IP) such as poor interoperability of specialized communication means, vulnerability against tapping and misuse, lack of possibilities to recover from failures, inability to use alternative data carrier and high deployment and operational costs.
- Add new smart functions to existing services which will make the communication more effective and helpful for users. Smart functions will be provided by distributed IT systems based on an agents’ infrastructure. Achieving these two project ambitions will allow creating a pervasive and trusted communication infrastructure fulfilling requirements of crisis management users and ready for immediate application.
This project emerged from cooperation in European technology platform EPoSS.
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[edit] Project objectives
In September 2006 the European Security Research Advisory Board (ESRAB) published a report setting the European security research agenda that contained basic requirements on new communication infrastructures. They can be summarized as follows:
- Secure in terms of protection against tapping and external intrusion.
- Trusted in the sense of behaving as expected by meaning minimising the threats for failure to be a basis for creating emergency solutions.
- Providing enhanced connectivity between various networks and devices.
- Transmission of various formats of information such as data, multimedia (voice, picture, video sequences, etc.), localisation data, etc.
- Advanced search functions embedded in infrastructure itself.
The goals of the SECRICOM project are based on these requirements of future users of the system. The project will create an infrastructure of a brand new quality, which was impossible until now, due to the state of maturity of various technologies used and the lack of cooperation between specialists in different communication areas.
[edit] Background
SECRICOM will bring interconnectivity of PTT traffic between different networks. In addition to mobile handsets, the Push-to-Talk service will be complemented with fixed PC applications acting as PTT clients connected to the mobile operator. SECRICOM is to be designed for coordinating and managing large variable groups instantly.
The background IP being brought to SECRICOM provides the basis for delivering managed end-to-end IP network services by making use of dynamically changing policy based routing and communication bearer specific interfaces with optimized bridging of routing protocols. The solution needs to be able to seamlessly support different user traffic (with different QoS and security requirements) over different communication bearers (with a range of capabilities), depending on the end user environment (e.g. disaster relief with ad hoc comms, mobile working with dynamically changing access to communications service provider networks). It needs to be dynamic (recognising that differing sets of bearers may be available at any particular time) and configurable (to enable incremental technology insertion as new solutions are rolled out).
The end to end service will support any SECRICOM user with any connections to any of the selected networks, as well as provide network access to the SECRICOM Control centre that will identify security issues with the provided end to end, multi bearer IP network and user services. SECRICOM will deliver a secure and reliable platform for heterogeneous communication infrastructures among mobile communication devices at the lowest level to the upper layer formed by distributed IT systems. Security is addressed in most of the distributed systems, such as grid systems, service oriented systems (SOA) and distributed agent systems.
It will provide a security solution for existing inexpensive easily accessible communication devices (Smartphones, PDAs, Laptops, etc.) which will be simply plugged in, preserving sensitive information, arranging authentication and encryption process during the communication.
[edit] Project consortium members
| Member | Knowledge |
|---|---|
 QinetiQ |
Internetwork interfaces, interoperable, recoverable and extendable network |
 Ardaco |
Secure wireless fault tolerant communication, system integration |
 Bumar |
Technical specification and testing, dissemination strategy |
 NEXTEL |
Communication testing, scenarios |
 Infineon Technologies |
System on chip design |
 Université du Luxembourg |
IPv6 based secure communication, advisory boards leader |
| Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences |
Theoretical background of secure agent infrastructures, analyses |
 Graz University of Technology |
Secure docking module |
| Smartrends |
Security analyses, intellectual property affairs, chip-level security |
| ITTI |
Development of system support |
| British Association of Public Safety Communication Officers |
End users view, dissemination |
 CEA LETI |
Dissemination leadership, research |
| Hitachi Europe SAS |
Docking module design, internetwork interfaces |
