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GCN Home > 02/04/08 issue

LAX goes reliably random

Game theory algorithm improves security by putting police on unpredictable schedules

By William Jackson

Police at Los Angeles International Airport are using a computer science doctoral dissertation to help make their operations so unpredictable that would-be terrorists could not target the airport’s facilities.

Terrorists can spend 18 to 36 months in surveillance of a potential target looking for vulnerabilities and patterns in security, said James Butts, deputy executive director of law enforcement for Los Angeles airports.

“If they choose you as a target, they are comfortable they can defeat your countermeasures,” Butts said. “So one of the best things you can do is not be predictable. We want to minimize their belief that they can have a success here.”

If terrorists do not know where the police will be or when, they cannot develop their own countermeasures, giving the police an edge. Since August, the airport has been using an application developed at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering to randomize scheduling of vehicle security checkpoints and has more recently expanded its use to K9 patrols.

Midwife to the project was the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE), a USC-based research center funded by the Homeland Security Department.

There have been no terrorist incidents at LAX since the application, called Armor, went into use, which is the ultimate goal — even if it’s hard to prove that something not happening is the direct result of the application. But the more measurable result is what checkpoints and patrols have found at the airport using their randomized schedules.

“So far, we have recovered three firearms, interdicted three cars with drugs and taken into custody one car of people of interest from an intelligence standpoint,” Butts said.

The core of the application is a randomization algorithm developed by doctoral student Praveen Paruchuri as part of his dissertation, “Keeping the Adversary Guessing: Agent Security by Policy Randomization.”

Paruchuri examined ways to counter the inherent advantage bad guys have over good guys. The good guys — such as those in airport security — have to make the first move by committing themselves to a policy or pattern. The bad guys then have the opportunity to study that pattern to find a way around it. The good guys have to anticipate everything, but the bad guys only have to find one weakness to exploit.

More news on related topics: IT Security, Homeland Security, Software Applications



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