Perimeter security: Know your adversary

Perimeters represent natural and/or manmade boundaries that enclose physical assets, ranging from nuclear power plants, air and sea ports, to entrances of commercial buildings and retail stores.

Traditional security industry experts often defer to systems that prevent, detect/verify, and delay/divert adversaries from executing their goals within the perimeter. Numerous articles and presentations describe an unending list of technologies and techniques -- such as bollards, fences, buried and fence-mounted seismic, magnetic acoustical cables, infrared, visible and microwave imaging devices -- for safeguarding perimeters. Analytical techniques can fuse the detected data from these tools into a form that can be further analyzed by rst responders.

The industry has created a perimeter security “toolkit” that is incredibly sophisticated, but relatively little discussion has focused on how these multiple tools can be used to build eective perimeter security systems, and whether they truly minimize false threats, reduce costs and allow an appropriate, measured response to be initiated. 

The Moscow airport attack in early 2011 exposed the weakness of a system designed to look inward, focusing on preventing a threat coming from a traveler boarding a plane. The system needed to look outward, beyond its self-dened perimeter, where the screening of carry-ons and ticketed passengers already takes place. In this case, the suicide bomb was set o by a terrorist who entered the arrivals hall. Had there been surveillance and, perhaps, other advanced integrated technologies at various locations on an extended perimeter, it is possible that the attack could have been prevented.

Homeland security managers and security system designers must analyze perimeters of transportation centers focusing on their adversaries’ goals and all scenarios for achieving them. Where will they attempt to breach perimeters? How will they do it? What behaviors will they display? What will be the dierences in their behaviors from the behavior of business travelers? Tourists? Employees? Or guests picking up passengers?

Know your adversary

Whether the perimeter is open or closed, hundreds of feet or hundreds of miles, knowing your adversary is critical when architecting security solutions. Then, by translating that knowledge into a spectrum of threat proles whose behaviors or characteristics are detected by multiple technologies, perimeter security systems that judge the severity of a security breach and allow eective implementation of an appropriate response can be designed.