Security tools in the physical world can be effectively used to protect our computing systems. In this video, you’ll learn about physical security devices and techniques.
IT security professionals not only need to be proficient in digital security. They also need to have a knowledge of physical security. One common physical security method is to have a barricade or a bollard that prevents people from accessing certain areas of a physical area. These are often used to channel people through a certain access point. And it’s common to have these bollards set up so that individual people can pass through but prevent any cars, trucks, or other vehicles from getting into that area.
These barricades can also be a security notice, especially if they’re brightly colored, letting everyone know that this is a high-security area. We often see these installed as concrete barriers or bollards. But you can also create barricades in other ways. For example, you may have water around a particular building and require people to go over a bridge to gain access to that facility.
When you enter or exit a building, there’s also a great deal of physical security, especially if you’re using something like an access control vestibule. This is one where there is a room you must pass through to be able to gain access to the rest of the building. This might be a room where all the doors are normally unlocked. And if you open one of those doors, no one else can enter the room while that door is unlocked.
Or this may have higher security, where all of the doors to the room are locked, and when you badge in or unlock the first door, all of the other doors remain locked and cannot be unlocked while that individual door is open. Or this may be the case where one of the doors of the room is always locked and the other door is unlocked. And when one door is open, the other door cannot be unlocked. Regardless of the configuration, these access control vestibules are designed to allow or control access through a particular area.
They may be a very small area, where only one person can traverse at a time. Or maybe it’s a controlled group of people, where you’re evaluating their identification and then allowing them through the room. Here’s an example of one of the doors to an access control vestibule. This one has a card reader or a biometric reader on the outside that could allow you access to the room, at which point you would check in with security, provide authentication, and they may give you a pass or a card to allow you access to the rest of the facility.
This is very common for very large data centers or for areas where you just need additional security to make sure that only the appropriate individuals are able to pass through that particular area. Another type of physical security control is a fence. This is one that’s relatively common, and it’s something that you can easily see is installed. In this example, you can see the fence going across the front of this facility. Because this is so obvious, it may not be the exact security control you’re looking for, but it does provide a very good way to prevent access through this area.
This may be a transparent fence, where you’re able to see what’s on the other side. Or you may design an opaque fence, where people can’t see what’s on the other side. From a security perspective, we would like these fences to be very robust. We don’t want someone to be able to bend the fence or knock down part of it to gain access to the area. And in very secure areas, you might want to make it more difficult for someone to gain access over the fence. This might include a very high fence, or you might have razor wire across the top, just to prevent anyone from gaining access by going over the fence.
Some physical security techniques require someone to stand in an area and monitor a particular location to watch for certain security events to occur. But you might be able to make this a bit more efficient by using a camera. When you’re putting a lot of cameras together that’s for your own use, sometimes you’ll see this referred to as CCTV, or the Closed Circuit Television.
These cameras are becoming increasingly more intelligent, so they have things built in such as motion detection so they can alarm or alert you if someone happens to walk through an area and, in some cases, can provide very detailed object detection and be able to read someone’s face or be able to read the license tag on a vehicle. Most organizations will have multiple cameras. These are all networked together and will send all of their video back to one single storage point so that you’re able to record this information from every camera over time.
But sometimes, you need more than a camera or some type of automated security. And if that’s the case, you may want to add a security guard for physical protection for anything that may happen in a particular area. This is someone who may sit at a front desk and validate that anyone walking into the building is either an employee or someone who is allowed in as a guest by an existing employee.
You often see security guards working as two or more people simultaneously to provide two-person integrity or control. This means that one security guard would not be able to circumvent the existing security policy, because there’s always someone else there to provide checks and balances. And in almost every organization, you’re required to wear an identification badge. This is a badge that may be on a lanyard, or it may be attached to a jacket or coat. And it will have a picture, a name, and other details about the person who has that identification badge.
This is a badge that you would wear and have visible to everyone at all times so they can easily see at a glance that you’re allowed to be in a particular area of the building. These are often integrated with the electronic locks that we might have on doors. So every time you badge into a room, you can use your identification card, and all of that information is logged to a central database.
One way to prevent attacker from gaining access to a building through a dark area is to simply illuminate that particular area with lighting. More light usually means more security because someone trying to get into your building who is unauthorized will probably want to do this outside the view of someone else. Sometimes, you can use cameras that have infrared technology to be able to see better in dark areas, but nothing is more secure than having a well-lit area if you’re trying to prevent somebody from sneaking into a building.
Finding the right light for an area is important as well. You want to be sure it’s one that can illuminate the entire areas, and you want to be sure that the lighting angles are important, especially if you’re using cameras to capture facial recognition. In a parking lot, for instance, you may have lights to be able to illuminate all of the cars in the parking lot and then have cameras that are able to monitor that parking lot 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
As we mentioned, we might have cameras using infrared technology to better see things that may be happening in the dark. These are devices that can detect infrared radiation in both light areas and dark areas and don’t need to have lights to be able to see what’s happening. It’s also common to see this infrared technology being used in things like motion detectors, where you’re not necessarily looking for video, you’re simply looking to see if there is something that may be moving in a particular area.
In some organizations, you might even use pressure sensors. So when somebody moves across an area, the pressure sensor notices the change in force and can alert or alarm you that something is passing through a particular location. Infrared is great for detecting motion in a relatively limited area.
But if you have a very large area that you would like to monitor, you might want to use microwave technologies. These are designed to detect movement over a much larger area and therefore might be a bit more efficient than infrared. And perhaps even more advanced is the ultrasonic detection. This is something that can send ultrasonic signals so you’re looking for a reflection of sound waves. This allows you to detect motion in an area and can even be used to provide collision detection, especially in something like a parking lot or a loading zone.