May 2003

Security Complex
Researchers and companies are answering the call to stop terror.

By Rich Lord

Please place your face in the center of the screen,” says Mario Savvides’ computer in a pleasant female voice. Savvides positions his goateed mug such that the camera atop his monitor captures his image and puts it into a center-screen box. The voice asks him to turn his head from side to side, nod up and down. Beep. He’s been authenticated.

I look a bit like Savvides. But when I sit before his computer, it locks up. Ditto for professor Vijayakumar Bhagavatula of Carnegie Mellon University’s electrical and computer engineering school. When Savvides reclaims his seat, the machine springs back into action.

Bhagavatula’s team started designing software that recognizes faces, voices and fingerprints in 2000, figuring it might be used in ATM machines. After Sept. 11, 2001, they detected a more pressing need. “Suppose you had this in the cockpit of an airplane,” says Bhagavatula. “If the wrong guy is in there, it could take over and give control to somebody on the ground.”

Another kamikaze hijacking is just one of the nightmare scenarios Pittsburgh researchers are gearing up to combat. Not only are they developing technologies and protocols that could save lives, they’re also making a play for billions of dollars in
government and private-sector spending.

Threat: BioAttack
Duct tape will only get us so far. If nerve gas is ever used against Americans, somebody will have to figure out what’s in the air, evacuate the survivors, treat them and decontaminate the area.

It may not be long before police, firemen and emergency medical workers are preparing for that eventuality by carrying Agentase LLC’s products. Using technology pioneered at the University of Pittsburgh, the Oakland company has developed chemical-coated enzymes that change color when exposed to various toxins. “We’re basically developing a pencil box, if you will, that has sensors, each of which would detect a number of different agents,” says Keith LeJeune, CEO of Agentase.

Agentase can develop its products thanks to $800,000 in federal contracts. That’s a sliver of the new Department of Homeland Security’s proposed $803 million budget for anti-terror research and development spending in 2004. That line item is driving many companies to adapt existing technologies to a darker age. For instance, Point Breeze-based ChemImage Corp.’s spectroscopes already analyze the molecular content of materials used in semiconductors, coatings and drugs. Now various federal agencies have hired the company to use the same technology to detect “threat agents” in air and water, says ChemImage president Patrick Treado.

The market for such technologies may heat up fast. The feds have set up a series of deadlines, starting last March and ending in June 2004, by which water providers have to assess their vulnerability to attack and plan for the worst. Leonard Casson, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, is working with the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority on its plan. He’s hoping to take what he’s learned from that process and, in conjunction with local security firms, help smaller water providers to contend with new concerns.

Securing the postal system is one of several projects that CMU’s department of engineering and public policy is working on. Turns out stopping anthrax attacks isn’t as simple as, say, blasting mail with radiation. “There are all sorts of trade-offs,” says Granger Morgan, professor and head of the department. Some materials decompose when irradiated, and a nuked letter “is often very brittle, and stinks.”

Unfortunately, the first warning of the next attack may be a line of people in some emergency room with symptoms the docs have never seen. A key clue may be the patients’ immune-system response. Oakland-based Immunetrics Inc. has developed software that predicts the body’s response to various attacks and is modeling anthrax’s effects. The tool could eventually help emergency room doctors to recognize an anthrax attack and aid drug companies developing treatments.

If none of that makes you feel safe, there’s always O’Hara-based Mine Safety Appliances’ hot-selling Response Escape Hood. The Murrysville-made gas masks for the Everyman are part of a disaster-response product line that has seen a doubling in sales since 9/11, says Eric Beck, MSA director of marketing. Unfortunately, he says, “It’s a market that’s going to be with us for a long time.”

Threat: Cyber Strike
Pradeep Khosla’s nightmare“— a denial-of-service attack which would bring the banking infrastructure down”—doesn’t sound as grim as a bio bomb. What’s scary is, it may be going on right now.

The incredibly complex networks that carry data are under constant attack from hackers, crackers and, very likely, terrorists. CMU’s Computer Emergency Response Team logged a record 82,094 assaults on worldwide networks in 2002. The likelihood that some were terror-related is “very high,” says Khosla, head of CMU’s new Center for Computer and Communications Security, or C3S, which includes CERT as a partner. “The real attack on the U.S. is going to be the attack on its economy,” he adds.

In November, C3S won a $35.5 million, five-year grant from the Department of Defense to develop terror-stopping technologies. That grant and funding from industry partners cover projects like assistant professor Adrian Perrig’s program for defeating denial-of-service attacks, which paralyze computers by bombarding them with messages from many sources. “Our new techniques allow the victim of such an attack to identify traffic that comes from a given source and drop the traffic,” says Perrig.

A smart attacker might knock out many points in the worldwide network at once, making it very difficult for “packets” of data to pick through the remaining routers and switches and get from one computer to another. Or he might catch a key piece of data—say, a presidential missive—and alter it en route. Or steal someone’s laptop and use it to get behind a network’s defenses. Or capture wireless Internet signals and distill passwords and other secrets from the ether. C3S is working on defenses against all of those possibilities.

“The vision I have is making Pittsburgh the cyber-security capital of the country,” says Khosla. The network-security industry is expected to grow from $17 billion a year to $46 billion by 2006, according to C3S’s research. Khosla is putting together a panel of local venture capitalists to evaluate and, it is hoped, fund the companies that C3S spins out, “so that the companies stay here,” says Khosla. “I don’t want them to go away.”

Threat: Widespread Panic
Today’s menaces are “distinctly unlike
the threats of the Cold War, which were quantifiable,” says Dr. Michael Allswede, section chief of the UPMC’s Special Emergency Response Center. We may not know we’re under attack until the body count starts mounting. Panic and paranoia could set in. Pittsburgh may turn out to be the nation’s antidote.

The region is big and varied enough that it can serveas a model for cities and towns alike. In UPMC it has a dominant medical system with vast resources. And it boasts researchers at UPMC, Pitt, CMU and the think-tank RAND’s (a contraction of “research and development”) Oakland office with broad expertise. That’s why an inordinate amount of the nation’s disaster-response planning is happening here.

Allswede has developed the Pittsburgh Matrix, a series of responses that hospitals can employ depending on the severity of a biochemical attack and when it’s discovered. He’s also the prime author of a bio-terror training regimen for police, fire and EMS workers that, he says, “is about to explode and go nationwide.” Similarly, UPMC may have an export product in its MedCall system, which allows the health system to mobilize 11,000 physicians within half an hour of a disaster.

Federal funding is allowing RAND to help Pittsburgh and Allegheny County to prepare for terrorism. That project, called In Defense of Our Community, is designed to serve as the prototype for similar-sized communities nationwide, says Dave Shlapak, a RAND policy analyst.

Researchers at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health are preparing response plans for nursing homes and Veterans Affairs medical centers, which could be targets of attacks, but would more likely be called upon to help treat victims. And professor Louise Comfort at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs is working on tying government agencies, hospitals, businesses and academia into one coordinated disaster-response network. In a crisis, her network would get the right information to the right places and help diagnose and respond to a developing emergency. Comfort is working with Butler County and Computer Investment Advice Inc. of Coraopolis to set up a beta test. Deploy it regionwide, says Comfort, and it might spawn a disaster-management industry and “make Southwestern Pennsylvania a very attractive place for companies to locate.”

Threat: Liberties Lost
Combine facial recognition, seamless computer networks and highly integrated government services, and you could end up with the movie Minority Report, minus the psychics. “These technologies, within a decade or two, may make it impossible for us to go to any public space anonymously,” says CMU’s Morgan.

Researchers say they’re aware of the possibility that what they’re developing could do what terrorists, on their own, never could: take away America’s freedoms. C3S, for instance, includes a component that studies the public-policy issues raised by homeland-security technology. While keeping in mind civil-liberties concerns, technologists have to soldier on, says Bhagavatula. “Bad technology is not a substitute for good policy.”

With urgent human need and market forces so neatly aligned, local researchers will continue to participate in this grimmest of emerging markets, says Scott Lammie, executive vice president of UPMC Diversified Services, which is the health system’s investment arm. “I believe that it’s going to be a long-term business-development opportunity because the threats are very real,” Lammie says. “I don't think it’s going to dissipate any time soon.”

Rich Lord is a regular contributor to Pittsburgh magazine.
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