Towards Trustworthy Mobile Social Networking Services for Disaster Response

TL;DR

This paper proposes a witness-based report verification system for mobile social networking in disaster response, aiming to improve trustworthiness and situational awareness through security, privacy, and simulation evaluations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel witness-based verification concept for trustworthy information sharing in disaster scenarios, addressing security and privacy challenges.

Findings

Group mobility patterns enhance verification effectiveness

Simulation results demonstrate system performance and trust improvements

Witness evaluation improves report reliability in disaster contexts

Abstract

Situational awareness is crucial for effective disaster management. However, obtaining information about the actual situation is usually difficult and time-consuming. While there has been some effort in terms of incorporating the affected population as a source of information, the issue of obtaining trustworthy information has not yet received much attention. Therefore, we introduce the concept of witness-based report verification, which enables users from the affected population to evaluate reports issued by other users. We present an extensive overview of the objectives to be fulfilled by such a scheme and provide a first approach considering security and privacy. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our approach in a simulation study. Our results highlight synergetic effects of group mobility patterns that are likely in disaster situations.