## 2 Overview of Cyber Threats in EM
### Communication Media
#### 2.1.6 Wireless Communication Networks
Their conclusion was that an \"all-in-one\" security device would be ideal. Such a Single Sign-On (SSO) technique has, in fact, been produced in [38], where the use of RFID accelerates authentication and automatic information retrieval. It additionally offers the flexibility of activating RFID tags only during the rescue missions and only for specified users. The RFID card can be deactivated immediately after a rescue mission, so as to minimise the impact of stolen cards. The specific framework has been designed for mobile communication between different agencies and includes a number of security measures. Communication between heterogeneous information providers is based on the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), and a Role Based Access Control (RBAC) model is used to control access rights. In addition, all entities communicate by using Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security with mutual authentication, as well as a logging service. The primary focus is on man-in-the-middle, replay and session hijacking attacks. The authors have developed a small scale prototype testbed to evaluate their framework in terms of performance, but have not evaluated its security in practice. Also, a security breach after the initial authentication, perhaps through social engineering, would leave the network vulnerable to an insider. Having got hold of a card, a malicious entity would be authenticated for a number of critical EM networks and services. Yet, it is important to note that while authentication of users and devices may often not be ideal, it needs to be seen in conjunction with efficiency, safety and usability. As observed in [62], for emergency medical staff that may not already be authorised to access certain data, it might be better to have some form of second-factor authentication mechanism. This need for a more dynamic framework has been addressed in [39], where temporary access to sensitive data is authorised for first responders even if they have not been pre-vetted. The encryption mechanism is based on hardware security, and in particular on separation kernel technology and processor-internal encryption for data storage. Emergency information is stored and accessed in a special emergency partition, which is unavailable before the emergency and is purged after it finishes. _Open issues in Wireless Communication Networks used in EM_: Considering that wireless communication mechanisms are often used in emergencies to address the availability issues of the damaged previous infrastructure, it is particularly interesting that there has been very little work in the literature related to the availability of these wireless EM systems. It is well known that availability of wireless networks can easily be denied externally, for example by random channel jamming, or internally by the insider threat of a compromised node. In fact, WMN networks deployed in a disaster are considered to be more vulnerable to such insider threats than other types of wireless networks because they typically depend on low-cost devices with poor physical security [40]. Multi-hop wireless networks are vulnerable to masquerading or captured nodes that advertise themselves to the rest of the network as being on the shortest or most cost-efficient route to a destination, but instead of forwarding traffic, they drop some (grayhole attack) or all of it (blackhole attack). In the meantime, the affected nodes drain their batteries while resending the same traffic [42]. This effect can be achieved for TCP traffic simply by dropping a small percentage of consecutive packets, with what is known as a Jellyfish attack [40]. If the dropped packets are cumulative acknowledgements, then the transport layer interprets this as evidence of congestion and reduces the rate of transmission. Such attacks require very little energy on the part of the attacker and are difficult to detect. Yet, research on EM wireless security has focussed almost exclusively on authentication and access control for privacy, data integrity and data confidentiality rather than availability.