HANDBOOK OF SECURITY BLUNDERS

We’ve undertaken hundreds of vulnerability assessments on a variety of different physical security devices, systems, and programs, including those involving nuclear safeguards. In the course of this work, we have repeatedly encountered many of the same kinds of security mistakes or deficiencies across a wide range of security applications. For the last several years, we have undertaken an effort to catalog the most common and serious of these security errors. We have also attempted to devise generic suggestions for avoiding or mitigating these problems. The result is a general catalog of security mistakes and countermeasures that we call “The Handbook of Security Blunders”. This paper discusses some of these mistakes and countermeasures that we believe to be most relevant for nuclear security and safeguards.