Framework for Emergency Response Officials (ERO): Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure

This document describe a framework (with the acronym ERO-AA) for establishing an infrastructure for authentication and authorization of Emergency Response officials (ERO) who respond to various types of man-made and natural disasters. The population of individuals authenticated and authorized under ERO-AA infrastructure includes Federal Emergency Response Officials (FEROs), State/Local/Tribal/Private Sector Emergency Response Officials (SLTP-EROs) and the FEMA Disaster Reserve Workforce (DRW). The system supports the establishment, conveyance and validation of Identity Credentials (ICs), Attribute Credentials (ATs) and Deployment Authorization Credentials (DAs). Apart from enumeration of the types of EROs and their associated authority domains (called major players) and types of credentials, the conceptualization of the framework for ERO-AA infrastructure includes detailed description of various component services under three major service classes: Credentialing Service Class, Identity Verification and Attribute Validation Service Class and Trust Federation Service Class.The framework is predicated upon the use of trusted tokens capable of supporting biometric as well as secret key based identity authentication.