Emergency Alert Namespace Said Likely to Improve Global Handling
GENEVA -- Consensus on a distributed, discoverable Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) identifier namespace is crucial to getting the most out of emergency messaging, an executive said. A June World Meteorological Organization workshop aims to debate ways to handle emergency messages internationally, executives said. The FCC has ordered CAP use by all U.S. communications providers.
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Consensus on configuration and handling of all CAP-based messages is the goal of the workshop, said Tony Rutkowski of Netmagic Associates and Yaana Technologies. CAP is an all- media emergency alerting and public warning standard for weather events, earthquakes, tsunami, volcanoes, public health crises, power outages, and other emergencies that would be distributed via cell phones, faxes, radio, TV, and the Internet. The name space would identify CAP messages, which authority is sending them and the associated policies, Rutkowski said. The CAP has definable fields for identifiers, but nobody has talked about how to use them in a coherent way, he said, and people are making up uncoordinated identifiers.
Some think globally aggregating CAP messages or handling them internationally using a globally unique identifier namespace would be a good idea, said Eliot Christian with the World Meteorological Organization. Globally unique identifiers may be based on Internet domain names, a non- intelligible identifier or by using the Object Identifier tree, said Christian, who’s senior scientific officer for WMO’s Information System.
Top-level domains might be one way to handle international CAP message identifiers, Christian said. However, ccTLDs don’t correspond exactly to the officially recognized nations in the U.N. system, Christian said. U.N. agencies likely would want to follow national designations, an executive said. Using a globally unique identifier that’s non-intelligible would be less than optimal, Christian said. People might want to talk with each other by phone about certain CAP messages using the identifier as a reference, he said.
Using an Object Identifier tree with a CAP message would make the source immediately obvious, Christian said. All CAP message identifiers could for example, be in the OID namespace starting with 2.43, followed by numerical representations for the country of origin, he said. A country’s assigning authority could add further refinement, Christian said. The structure could indicate which governmental authority sent the message, he said. The namespace would include identifiers for messages, policies and parties, Rutkowski said.
Consensus on a CAP identifier namespace is critical to getting the most out of the spec, Rutkowski said. A simple, structured, numerical identifier is needed to accommodate the world’s diverse cultures and languages, Rutkowski said. Intelligible information from an authoritative source with added trust capabilities could be queried and discovered with an OID resolution system, Rutkowski said. ITU-T member countries are debating an OID resolution system.
Draft consensus for implementers likely will be developed at the workshop, Rutkowski said. General requirements will cover usability, flexibility, extensibility, scalability and deployment, he said. Distributed versus centralized management approaches will be discussed, Rutkowski said.
Trusted distribution of cybersecurity incident forensics and vulnerabilities is one other potential emerging use for the CAP spec and a resolution system capability adding trust, Rutkowski said. There’s no good way for doing this outside of some very closed circles, Rutkowski said. “CAP could fill the bill,” he said. The workshop is scheduled for June 22-23 at the WMO.