Wiley Handbook of Science and Technology for Homeland Security, 4 Volume Set

PROTECTING SECURITY SENSORS AND SYSTEMS

TODD P. CARPENTER

Adventium Labs, Minneapolis, Minnesota

1 INTRODUCTION

Security systems are key protection elements which prevent, detect, mitigate, minimize, and aid recovery from natural, accidental, and intentional threats ranging from weather effects, illness and disease, to misguided youth, hardened criminals, and terrorists. The security systems can be focused on the outside, perimeter, or be inward facing. The systems can be self-contained, such as common smoke detectors, or they can include multiple sensors of different types, integrated together over a distributed sensing and power network with storage of events, sensor fusion and event correlation, and automatic escalation of event notification based on severity. These systems can be purely physical (e.g. military trip wire and flash bang), or heavily supported by electronic sensing and analysis. Security systems considered in this article integrate some type of sensor, reasoning (is it an event or not?), and alarm or state annunciation. Simpler physical security systems, such as a door lock or a Sargent and Greenleaf [1] lock on a file cabinet, are not explicitly addressed. Locks have their own fascinating and evolving issues, which can be explored in [2–5]. Systems considered here share the potential for physical, cyber, and social engineering vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit to overcome the security system. This article provides an overview of threats, potential weaknesses, ...