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Fast, Accurate Detection of Explosives

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the nose-for-crime dept.

It doesn't come easy writes "Fast, highly reliable detection of residues that could indicate the presence of explosives and other hazardous materials inside luggage is now possible with technology under development at Purdue University. Recent improvements to a previously developed prototype have proven successful at detecting at the picogram (trillionths of a gram) level in lab tests, about 1,000 times less material than previously required. From the article: 'In the amount of time it requires to take a breath, this technology can sniff the surface of a piece of luggage and determine whether a hazardous substance is likely to be inside, based on residual chemicals brushed from the hand of someone loading the suitcase.'"

13 of 270 comments (clear)

  1. Vulnerable to a "chaffing" attack? by patniemeyer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ok, here's something I've always wondered about. If you have these exquisitly sensitive machines that can detect even a few molecules of material, aren't they by the same token super-vulnerable to being attacked by "chaffing" or overloading?

    Couldn't a bad guy simple walk around the airport with some material on his shoes and permanently, for all time, destroy the effectiveness of the instruments? I mean, how could one possibly clean a whole airport down to a few molecules worth of the stuff?

    Isn't that a *huge* hole in any "super sensitive" chemical detection system?

    1. Re:Vulnerable to a "chaffing" attack? by pe1chl · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The whole principle of the detector is that it is not possible to clean it sufficiently...
      If that were possible, the terrorists could clean their stuff before having it checked.

  2. Oh great... by Dr.+Zowie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    now, when I fly, I have to worry not just about whether I handled matches or toy cap guns or went to the shooting range in the last 24 hours, but also whether my neighbor, my dog, or the taxi driver handled any nitrate-laden deli meat in the last month.

  3. Good luck to explosives manufacturers... by DrInequality · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Good luck to explosives manufacturers - there go your chances of ever flying again!

    --
    DROS - Open-Source Robot Software
  4. Quickest Means Possible by Namronorman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    People fly because they want to go somewhere as fast as possible. With recent rules and regulations regarding airports, it's been becoming slower and slower to fly anywhere. Perhaps with the advancement in technology such as this, we can slowly relieve the stress of having to fly somewhere.

    --
    $fortune
    Tomorrow has been canceled due to lack of interest.
  5. I'd say it's a good thing by JavaRob · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes, it's vulnerable to false positives -- for example, some construction workers are going to have to go through the slow way every time they fly.

    That's okay, though -- the positive thing here is that the initial check can be made much much faster. Most luggage and most people can just be zipped through (they'll hardly need to stop walking!)... which leaves more resources available to help the inevitable false positives get processed in the old, slow way (with the little explosive-check tabs, or a search by hand) as efficiently as possible.

    That's what matters, isn't it? Speeding the whole thing up, to make a reliable screening feasible.

    1. Re:I'd say it's a good thing by mgv · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, it's vulnerable to false positives -- for example, some construction workers are going to have to go through the slow way every time they fly.

      That's okay, though -- the positive thing here is that the initial check can be made much much faster. Most luggage and most people can just be zipped through (they'll hardly need to stop walking!)... which leaves more resources available to help the inevitable false positives get processed in the old, slow way (with the little explosive-check tabs, or a search by hand) as efficiently as possible.

      That's what matters, isn't it? Speeding the whole thing up, to make a reliable screening feasible.

      Well, if it was used sensibly, that would be ok.

      The risks are still two fold:

      1) If the rate of false positives is low, alot of people will get through quickly. However, if you are one of the false positives, you may well get a very bad deal at the airport. Having been singled out on one trip to the US for no apparent reason (Probably because I took a "one way" flight so maybe they thought I was not planning to return!) I can assure you its no fun if you end up on the wrong end of a statistical test.

      2) If there are too many false positives, people get blase. After all, how many people in the history of all plane flight have put explosives on a plane? A few dozen maybe, probably less than 100 all up. But any test will likely have many more false positives, and this will mean that these people get ignored.

      3) You may still be using the wrong test, and get falsely reassured. After all, the September 11 hijackers would have passed a chemical detection test, so they would have been fine to board, no? Again, the real problem here wasn't that the test systems failed, it was the human management of the system - people weren't serious enough about the tests that were already in place.

      So, you end up putting alot of money into doing something that will help very few flights, incovenience a large total number of innocent people, and possibly not protect the public at all.

      After all, 3000 people died on September 11 due to a rare incident that is unlikely to ever happen again. 3000 people die every day in road accidents around the world. Which do you think gets society the best return for its time and energy? Yes, we have to stop terrorists, but just how far is it worth going here?

      Michael

      --
      There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
  6. Sorely Needed by evil+agent · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Not at airports, but subways. A local news station did a report on the lack of security in Chicago's transit system, the CTA. According to the report:

    "More people rode the CTA today than will pass through O'hare and Midway over the entire Thanksgiving weekend. Yet the feds only provide a penny per passenger for security on buses or trains... compared to seven or eight bucks for each plane passenger."

    Doesn't really make sense, does it?

    --
    End transmission.
  7. Nah by JavaRob · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is specifically about *airport* security. It's about keeping the planes safe. A terrorist seeking to blow up an airliner would have a tough time if he acquired his supplies at his destination.

    Of course, this brings up the point that even if we *did* manage to make planes super-safe, it remains simply impossible to protect all of the other soft targets all over the country. There are so many legitimate uses of explosive materials and the ingredients thereof that they can't all be secured, and any place that people are in large numbers is a potential target (including any school, stadium, office building, church, theater, etc.)... BUT Americans are nervous about planes after 9/11, so even though seeing the same attack again is unlikely, it makes constituents feel safer if we pump lots of money into airport security.

    It's a shame that this is how we go about "waging the war on terrorism", but that's how the world works.

  8. No, not really... by xanthines-R-yummy · · Score: 3, Insightful
    This is basically a portable mass spectrometer which is very very very accurate as well as sensitive. It's so accurate, it can give the identities of proteins as well its sequence. Now, this "portable" (I use quotes, because its as portable as mass spec machines can be) model probably won't be THAT accuarate, but probably more so than any other machine. It would be hard to get false positives out of this thing because of its accuracy.

    As for chaffing. I don't think this machine was meant to analyze the atmosphere of the entire airport. You just swab the bag and run it through the machine. There are ways to make the readings meaningless, but this would indicate some fishy behavior and cause for "other" means of investigation (ie "Bend over, son.").

    This would be a real boon for forensic science in general, if they've managed to make one for a relatively cheap price in addition to its size. Now you don't have to wait for the lab, you can bring it with you.

    1. Re:No, not really... by fishbowl · · Score: 5, Insightful


      "You'd hope the screeners would wonder why they suddenly started getting a 100% hit rate and figure it out."

      You're overestimating the intuition possessed by law enforcement and security people.

      --
      -fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
  9. it seems by ColaMan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It seems to me that you could certainly circumvent this easily enough, with just some social engineering. Carry a lot of sniffer-activating things in your luggage. Travel 15 times on the route, or until you reliably know the security people.

    After 15 times, the conversation goes like so:

    You: "Hi Steve."
    Security: "Hi John."
    Detector : beeep! bip! beep! bip! beep! BEEEEEEEP!
    You: "Damn detector. Can't they tone those things down a little?"
    Security: "Every time you go through, these things go off."
    (opens luggage)
    Security: "Cheese, fertiliser, and trinitite. Again."
    You: "Well, a man's got to earn a living some way. Isn't there some form or something I can fill out to get out of this?"
    Security: "Nope. Everyone gets checked."
    (closes luggage)
    Security: "Off you go."

    Travel 15 times without the bomb so everyone gets to know you.
    The 16th time, travel with the bomb concealed somewhere in your luggage, but
    leave the cheese , fertiliser and trinitite on top. Odds are pretty good that you'll get on that plane.

    --

    You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
    There is a lot of hype here.
  10. It's posts like these... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's posts like these on /. and around the Internet that are starting to push me further and further away from the left side of politics and /. itself. For instance this story is about a specific technology used to find traces of chemicals. It doesn't have an inkling of political skewing about it.

    So now we have the parents post (currently modded +4 interesting) who claims that this new technology could be used to suppress the population. The parent never bothers to extrapolate on how this technology in the article could be used for the purpose of suppression of course. We are just supposed to accept the fact that it will sometime in the future under the guise of a totalitarian government. Notice how we are supposed to just accept his didactic terms the parent lays out? That's called propaganda.

    The parent is why I'm moving away from the left. It seems the lefts (and /.) groupthink supports irrationality, conspiracy theory and poorly thought out historical analogies. Is the Bush admin doing a bad job? Yes I totally agree. But I don't think we are ever going to be taken serious in our claims or actions to change the system when some of our fellow progressives are completely irrational in the way that they present themselves.

    The parent post is pretty offtopic from the subject at hand but I had to respond.