An innovative Airport Physical-cyber Security System (APSS)

Considering the number of airports in the world, the 100 of millions of people who work at or pass through them and the relatively small amount of vulnerabilities, which have come to fruition to date, it must be concluded that airports already have a largely adequate level of security and resilience. Recent attacks in Brussels and Paris have, however, indicated that there is still room for improvement. In addition, one should be aware of the increased number of terrorist attacks also exploiting the increased availability of advanced low-cost technology, such as jammers. Thus, we propose to operate the logical division of the airport into physical-cyber security-control, where a multi sensor data fusion is made on two levels: (i) data fusion within each segment, in order to generate the alarms, and (ii) correlation of the “segment alarms” in order to reduce the false (positive and negative) detection rate. In the proposed solution, data resulting from the two fusion processes are viewed and made available by a Web Portal accessible by security officers and police, increasing the physical-cyber situational awareness and decision making. This approach dramatically increases the confidence level of threat detection, minimizes the false (positive and negative) rate, due to both initial correlation of alarms within the same segment and the final correlation of the alarm coming from different segments. This allows to proactively take countermeasures against such threats. A R T I C L E I N F O : RECEIVED: 01 JUL 2019 REVISED: 05 SEP 2019 ONLINE: 22 SEP 2019 K E Y W O R D S : airport security, data fusion, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, cyber-physical systems Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 W. Matta & A. Cantelli-Forti, ISIJ 43, no. 3 (2019): 285-293