PROVIDING FOR DATA SECURITY IN THE GIS APPLICATIONS FOR PUBLIC SAFETY

GIS systems are used in wide range of applications of sensitive nature, this paper intends to concentrate on emergency contingency planning and emergency response management applications of GIS from the point of view of providing the necessary data security in providing public safety and homeland security. These applications necessitate the use of secured communications and networking. Geographic data sets occupy large memory space and most of them are in public domain, it is considered that only the data representing locational intelligence specific to the application need to be kept secure data. Multi-user GIS implementations are based on n-tier client-server architecture, the data transmissions in question would be between the server and the clients, some of the clients might be remote and/or mobile clients. In order to provide data secrecy and authenticity the cryptographic technique PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) application is proposed as a solution. The 8-steps security protocol explained in this paper can be used to provide a high-level of data security avoiding overloading the network as much as possible. PKI Protocol would secure the communication channels as well as introduce the tools for authentication. The advantages and limitation of the proposed protocol is reported.