A model for the evaluation of barriers and containers and their resistance to physical attack

One role of The Home Office Scientific Development Branch (HOSDB) is to evaluate the performance of security barriers and containers to assess whether they are suitable for use by the wider government and industry. The information and knowledge gained from these evaluations allows HOSDB to provide accurate advice to its wide customer base. Evaluations of this type have been undertaken for more than twenty years against national standards. However, standards and test specifications of this kind, designed to test products against the typical threat to domestic or commercial premises, have never provided an exact fit to HOSDB requirements. HOSDB needed an evaluation standard which dealt with a higher level of threat and had greater flexibility in the choice of attack tools available to the evaluation team. The physical barriers attack standard (PBAS) has been developed to provide a tailor made evaluation methodology for HOSDB and its key sponsors. As an alternative to toolkit based performance standards, PBAS introduces a tool scoring system, which uses a blend of different risk and performance metrics to score each tool. This paper describes the PBAS methodology and discusses its main principles of operation. The requirement is discussed with reference made to the existing national standards and those historically used by HOSDB. The paper discusses the key tool metrics used by PBAS: noise; weight; portability; availability; and effectiveness. The tool selection and scoring process is described in detail. The advantages of PBAS are also highlighted in comparison to the previous evaluation methodology. The paper then describes the problems and issues associated with the new model and what needs to be done in order to address these. The points made throughout the paper are supported with evidence collected from a feasibility study carried out in 2004 through a series of live evaluations