San Francisco International Airport and Quantum Secure's SAFE for Aviation System: Making the Business Case for Corporate Security

On January 22, 2008, Assistant Deputy Director of Aviation Security Kim Dickie met with her team in a conference room at San Francisco International Airport (known by its three-letter airport code. SFO) to review the challenge facing them.

Steadily rising passenger counts and the increasing launch of service by low-cost carriers such as Virgin America, Southwest Airlines, and JetBlue Airways had compelled SFO's Airport Director John Martin to announce plans to renovate and reopen Terminal 2, shuttered in 2000 upon the opening of SFO's new international terminal. The $383 million project would require new heating and ventilation installations, energy-efficient architectural design, and the construction of four additional gates, but Dickie was focused on the security infrastructure requirements.' In addition Dickie's boss, Henry Thompson, the Associate Deputy Airport Director of Safety and Security, had a mandate to overhaul the security infrastructure of the airport, tightening loopholes around employees and passenger security, airside operations, badge credentialing, physical identity and access management, as well as investing in technology, automation, and intelligence to create a next-generation model airport.

Dickie and her team saw the Terminal 2 reopening as an opportunity to start a much-needed transition to a long-term airport wide credentialing and physical identity and access management (PIAM) system that would meet the growing need of airport risks and comply with regulations from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA)? After months of work, she and her team had selected Ouantum Secure's SAFE for Aviation software suite as the new Terminal 2 credentialing system.

The infrastructure upgrades required by the renovation provided both momentum and initial support from senior executives, but Dickie still needed to justify a state-of-the-art airport credentialing system that would address airport security risks while complying with TSA regulations. Dickie and her team had a small window of opportunity to develop a business case that would convince senior management to fund the purchase.

Selecting a Solution With the announcement that SFO would be renovating Terminal 2 to accommodate increased demand for gates from discount air carriers, Dickie's team needed to decide how to solve its PACS challenges. For decades, SFO had relied on physical access systems the systems that opened and closed doors that were not designed to implement integrated processes, such as policies related to access grant or revocation, as well as the ability to manage compliance with internal controls.

Although SFO had led the industry with the installation of biometric technology at access control doors in 1990, "it was very painful," Dickie said. "We desperately wanted to move away from legacy manual processing to automating and streamlining our credential issuance process. We were also thinking to rip and replace our old physical access system at the same time. Although SFO had managed to stave off expensive hardware upgrades for many years, the evolving demands of physical security had required periodic software upgrades, a marriage of new and old that was not without occasional problems. The Terminal 2 renovation project therefore came at an opportune moment for Dickie's team, as it presented an opportunity to begin a migration to a new PACS on a newly opened area of the airport that did not yet face the strain of full everyday usage.

Dickie first hired a systems integrator that shortlisted several companies and managed the request for proposal process before ultimately helping the team select a newer PACS for Terminal 2. "We had a situation where we had a 20-year-old access control system in place, and we wanted to migrate off of it into a new platform, but we had to do it in a phased manner due to bandwidth constraints," Dickie said. "Knowing that we were going to have a newer and different PAC running in Terminal 2 and the older PACS still running everywhere else in the airport, we were looking for a new badging solution that could interface with both and provide us with a much-needed identity and credential lifecycle management system-all at onece.

This requirement meant that the badge provisioning software would have to communicate with the old and new PACS while being flexible enough to accommodate new TSA directives and interface with the newly deployed PACS. After a rigorous examination of the options available, Dickie and her team selected Quantum Secure's SAFE for Aviation product. They considered other vendors, but felt that Quantum Secure offered the most comprehensive solution and also provided a robust audit and compliance system.

"We talked to all the various vendors, and then to other airports, most of whom did not have a separate badging system; they just badge through the physical access control systems," Dickie said "The badges that come out in the previous process have no intelligence built in. After the physical production of the badge, all processes from pre-enrollment of an airport identity to badge assignment to access management leading to termination of the access--all processes are done manually with lots of. errors and no accountability. We knew Quantum Secure had done work for Toronto, so we called them and understood how Quantum's technology is being leveraged by them. They had three PACS systems that they had to converge. We thought we had it bad with two. We got a lot of positive comments from Toronto and how they fully automated tough manual processes, including audit and compliance requirements. We placed a lot of importance on Quantum's ability and willingness to service us and deliver airport-specific functionality and enhancements as they became necessary, because in the physical security world, especially with airports, the goalposts are always moving."

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