As a result of the rising threats of terrorism, airport security has become a major issue. Patients with orthopaedic implants are concerned that they may activate alarms at airport security gates. A literature overview showed that the activation rate of the alarm by hand-held detectors is higher than for arch detectors (100% versus 56%). Arch detection rate has significantly increased from 0% b...

Airports are a prime target for terrorist organizations, drug traffickers, smugglers, and other nefarious groups. Traditional forms of security assessment are not real-time and often do not exist for each airport and port of entry. Thus, homeland security professionals must rely on measures of attractiveness of an airport as a target for attacks. We present an open source indicators approach, u...

Insider threats are one of the serious hard problems of organizational security because it is often unclear whether or not an actor is an insider, or what we actually mean by “insider”. In addition, it is frequently almost impossible to verify if an authorized insider action (authorized at the level of an operational policy) would constitute an insider attack contravening the organizational sec...

The paper focusses on the use of wireless networks, with special emphasis on Wi-Fi, in the manoeuvering and apron areas of an airport to control the ground vehicles movements in those areas and, consequently, to improve user safety, efficiency of operations and airport security. The use of Wi-Fi for these purposes constitutes a novel approach in an airport environment. Other wireless networks, ...

Architectural tactics are design decisions intended to improve some system quality factor. Since their initial formulation, they have been formalized, compared with patterns and associated to styles. However, the initial set of tactics for security has only been refined once. We have examined the tactics set and classification from the viewpoint of security research, and concluded that some tac...

To understand the causes of turbulence and disorder in the post– Cold War world it is necessary to examine sub-national and transnational forces as well as inter-state relations. The danger is that the consideration of new security challenges will encourage the fabrication of enemies or security threats. This, however, should not inhibit efforts to reassess the challenges to national and intern...

We consider a service system with two Poisson arrival queues. A server chooses which queue to serve at each moment. Once a queue is served, all the customers will be served within a fixed amount of time. This model is useful in studying airport shuttling or certain online computing systems. We propose a simple yet optimal state-independent policy for this problem which is not only easy to imple...

The security burden on the user can be lessened by automating security tasks or by making them more implicit (i.e., by embedding or mapping security actions to user tasks or applications). Doing so is in keeping with the reality that for users, security is almost never their primary goal. However, there seems to be a number security tasks which necessarily require involvement from users in ways...