[earlywarning] New Charter Text Proposal

[Hannes Tschofenig <[e-mail]>]

Hi all, 

as you all have seen it is a bit difficult to come up with a text that makes everyone happy. Please find an updated proposal below based on the recent discussions on the list. 

Ciao
Hannes


Authority to Citizen Alert (ATOCA)
==================================

There are a variety of mechanisms that authorities have available to
notify citizens and visitors of emergency events. Traditionally, they
have done so with broadcast networks (radio and television). For commercial mobile devices, broadcasting services such as the Public Warning System (PWS), the Earthquake and Tsunami Warning System (ETWS), and the Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS) are standardized and are in the process of being deployed.  The Internet provides another way for authority to citizen alerts to be sent, but it also presents new challenges. While there are some existing layer 2
mechanisms for delivering alerts the work in this group focuses on
delivering alerts to IP endpoints only. 

The general message pattern that this group is intended to address is
the sending of alerts from a set of pre-authorized agents (e.g.,
governmental agencies) to a large population without impacting the layer
2 networks (e.g. causing congestion or denial of service). The goal of
this group is not to specify how originators of alerts obtain
authorization, but rather how an ATOCA system can verify that
authorization and deliver messages to the intended recipients. A
critical element of the work are the mechanisms that assure that only
those pre-authorized agents can send alerts via ATOCA, through an
interface to authorized alert distribution networks (e.g., iPAWS/DM-Open
in the U.S.).

This work is differentiated from and is not intended to replace other
alerting mechanisms (e.g., PWS, CMAS, ETWS), as the recipients of these
ATOCA alerts are the wide range of devices connected to the Internet and
private IP networks which humans may have "at hand" to get such events,
as well as automatons who may take action based on the alerts. This
implies that the content of the alert contains some information which is
intended to be consumed by humans, and some which is intended to be
consumed by automatons.  Ideally, the alerts would contain, or refer to
media other than text media (e.g., audio and/or video), but the initial
work in the group is focused on small messages, which may be
mechanically rendered by the device in other forms (text to speech for
example). In situations of a major emergency there could be scenarios
where there are multiple alerts generated that may require that a
priority mechanism (defined by alert originator policy) has to be used.
The work on a resource priority mechanism is out of scope of the initial
charter, but may be revisited at a later date.

Which devices should get alerts is primarily driven by location.  The
first set of recipients that must be catered for are those within the
area identified by the alert originator to be affected by the alert.  In
many jurisdictions, there are regulations that define whether
recipients/devices within the affected area have opt-in or opt-out
capability, but the protocols we will define will include both opt-in
and opt-out mechanisms. The group will explore how to support both
opt-in and opt-out at the level of communication protocols and/or device
behavior. 

Another class of recipients that are in scope of the work are explicit
opt-in subscriptions which ask for alerts for a specified location, not
necessarily the physical location of the device itself. An example of
such a subscription would be 'send me alerts for location x' (previously
determined as the location of interest). This work may build on existing
IETF geopriv location work. 

There are efforts in other fora on early warning, which will be
considered in this effort.  For example, we expect to make use of the
OASIS Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) for the encoding of alerts.  OGC,
ATIS, TIA, ITU-T, ETSI and 3GPP also have alert efforts underway, and
consultation with these efforts will be undertaken to avoid unnecessary
duplication of effort and also to avoid unintentional negative impacts
on the layer 2 networks. Of course, existing protocols for delivering
messages (e.g., SIP) will be the basis for the message delivery system
of this working group.

The security implications of mechanisms that can send alerts to billions
of devices are profound, but the utility of the mechanism encourages us
to face the problems and solve them. In addition, the potential
performance and congestion impacts to networks resulting from sending
alert information to billions of devices must be considered and solved
if such a service is implementable.

Milestones
 
TBD      Initial document for "Terminology and Framework" document. 
         A starting point for this work is
         draft-norreys-ecrit-authority2individuals-requirements.
TBD      Initial document for conveying alerts in SIP. 
         A starting point for this work is draft-rosen-sipping-cap
TBD	  Initial document for conveying alerts through point to
multipoint methods.
TBD      Initial document for locating the alerting server for a
geographic region. 
         A starting point for this work is
draft-rosen-ecrit-lost-early-warning.
TBD	  Initial document addressing security, performance and congestion issues for alert distribution.
TBD	  Initial document for interfacing existing alert
distribution systems.