During disasters, crisis, and emergencies the public relies on online
services provided by official authorities to receive timely alerts,
trustworthy information, and access to relief programs. It is therefore crucial for the authorities to reduce risks when accessing their
online services. This includes catering to secure identification of
service, secure resolution of name to network service, and content
security and privacy as a minimum base for trustworthy communication.

In this paper, we take a first look at Alerting Authorities (AA) in
the US and investigate security measures related to trustworthy and
secure communication. We study the domain namespace structure,
DNSSEC penetration, and web certificates. We introduce an integrative threat model to better understand whether and how the online
presence and services of AAs are harmed. As an illustrative example, we investigate 1,388 Alerting Authorities. We observe partial
heightened security relative to the global Internet trends, yet find
cause for concern as about 78% of service providers fail to deploy
measures of trustworthy service provision. Our analysis shows two
major shortcomings. First, how the DNS ecosystem is leveraged:
about 50% of organizations do not own their dedicated domain
names and are dependent on others, 55% opt for unrestricted-use
namespaces, which simplifies phishing, and less than 4% of unique
AA domain names are secured by DNSSEC, which can lead to DNS
poisoning and possibly to certificate misissuance. Second, how Web
PKI certificates are utilized: 15% of all hosts provide none or invalid
certificates, thus cannot cater to confidentiality and data integrity,
64% of the hosts provide domain validation certification that lack
any identity information, and shared certificates have gained on
popularity, which leads to fate-sharing and can be a cause for instability.