While the university takes part in Emergency Awareness Week, a week set aside to make students aware of safety precautions on the campus, a recent study shows text message alert systems, including the one the university uses, could fail to alert students in an emergency event.

Patrick Traynor, an assistant professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, released a report in September saying systems designed to send out mass text messages have many flaws and could result in a failure to deliver an emergency message.

Traynor compared it to a showerhead in a bathroom.

“All of the water from the wall comes out the many holes, and that works well,” Traynor said. “Right now, it is like they are sending all of the water out of one hole.”

In an emergency situation where a mass text message is sent to everyone, the network has a greater chance of “maxing out,” he said, meaning texts could be received out of order, take several minutes to receive or could be sent from a fraudulent source.

“If I wanted to create a panic, there is no way people can tell where the messages came from,” Traynor said. “Universities say that they put specific things in the beginning of their texts, but … anyone could pretend to be the university. A bad guy could do it.”

The Department of Public Safety uses UMD Alerts to send out text alerts during emergencies. However, University Police spokesman Capt. John Brandt said he is not worried about the findings in the report.

“It is not new news,” he said. “The people who operate these systems are aware of the problems inherent in the system.”

But Brandt admitted flaws do exist. Messages can take a long time to be received by students, but social networks will ensure that most students will receive the message, he said. Fraudalent messages are also not a strong concern, he added, because only a few people have access to the University Police text message broadcast system, so a person who creates a fraudulent text message cannot send it to the service’s subscribers.

The system used at the university has seen tremendous growth since its implementation in spring 2007. About 9,000 students and members of the campus community were signed up last September, but Brandt said the number has jumped to about 20,000.

Traynor said that a new system is being built to allow anyone within a certain distance from a cell tower to receive an emergency message.

While many students are signed up for the service, most don’t consider it life-saving technology.

“I don’t particularly feel safer because of [the text message system], especially since I forgot it existed until a second ago,” said John Hamilton, a junior English major.

The university doesn’t rely only on the emergency text message system. Other campus emergency warning systems include sirens, WMUC 88.1 radio and the snow line (301-405-SNOW).

“The idea is to have a bunch of different ways to get the message out there,” Brandt said.

jbauerdbk@gmail.com