Designing Resilient and Secure Large-Scale Crisis Information Systems

Large-scale distributed systems are often conceived as a federation of multiple heterogeneous system islands, called to interoperate for a common objective. In this context, reliability and security are commonly recognized as nontrivial key technical concerns to be guaranteed, considering the obstacles imposed by the heterogeneity of components and the scale of the system. The scope of this chapter is to determine the requirements to be satisfied in order to provide reliability and security when designing federated large-scale distributed systems. As a concrete case, the chapter focuses on crisis information systems, as they are a typical example of a large-scale federated system, where a common agreement about the requirements to be satisfied in order to assume that a crisis information system is reliable and secure, is missing. Moreover, scarce details are provided to describe the means that available commercial products have applied in order to satisfy the reliability and security requirements, in particular confidentiality, and/or to tolerate the faults that may affect a crisis information system. The chapter surveys the available literature and practice on this topic, and proposes an innovative solution for reliable and confidential crisis information systems in the context of the platform under development within the EU-funded projects named DESTRIERO and SECTOR.