CSRIC Report Examines 911 Standards in an IP World
The FCC’s newly reconstituted Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council approved a report Friday on next-generation 911 standards development. The report was the first to be approved by the new CSRIC and had to be completed within a tight eight-week timeframe. The report was still being finalized and was not released by CSRIC Friday.
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The report examines the standards necessary “to actually do everything we're doing in an E911 environment in a next-generation 911 environment where it’s IP-based you'll have access to more information,” said a CSRIC official after the meeting.
The report looks at gaps in the system where standards need to be completed. “There is no comprehensive plan on how the various standards tie together to facilitate that transition,” according to the presentation to the CSRIC. “There are standards in place for various functional entities and interfaces, but missing is a complete end-to-end view that ties these standards together to allow for the orderly transition to NG911.”
Also missing so far, are standards on how public safety answering points will obtain, store, access, secure and maintain new types of data that may be available under NG911, such as medical data, alarm data and floor plans, according to the presentation.
The report identifies 154 standards that are relevant to NG911, covering everything from NG911 in border areas to whose addresses will be supplied to call centers in an IP world. Standards have been completed in 125 areas, according to the presentation to the group. For 14, standards are in the publication queue, eight are in the approval stage, four are still under development and one is without a comprehensive document.
The report rates various standards, determining which should be classified as critical for deployment, critical for competition, applicable to long-term (post transition) efforts, desirable or non-critical. The report also examines who the stakeholders are who need to be taken into account as NG911 rolls out.
Otherwise, CSRIC heard a variety of reports from various working groups that do most of the work of the committee. Among them, Jennifer Rexford of the Computer Science Department at Princeton University, discussed a pending report on inter-domain routing.
"The work we've done so far … has been focusing first of all on documenting the threats against the inter-domain routing system, including real incidents that have happened over the past 10 or 15 years and hypothetical things that could happen, known vulnerabilities of the protocol that we have now,” Rexford said. “We have also identified a suite of different candidate solutions to the security problem and a way that we want to compare those solutions.” A key issue is the “first mover problem” in inter-domain routing since “nobody wants to deploy until everyone else has,” she said.
A consumer and PSAP sub-team is examining best practices for reaching out to consumers on how to avoid 911 overload during severe weather and similar disasters, officials said Friday.