ITS Transport Safety and Security

We all want to feel safe when we’re travelling, whether it’s by road, rail, sea, air or simply on foot. A host of organisations, including government, transport operators and providers are working on it – and we’re right there with them.

The intensive level of travel in modern societies means we need intelligence to be built into transport systems to minimise risk while maintaining freedom of movement. At a basic level, that involves using cameras, scanners and other devices to detect and screen objects and people.

At a higher level, it also involves carrying out security evaluations. This is one of our areas of special expertise – we’ve carried out more than 60 per cent of UK government security evaluations and we provide top-level security solutions for governments worldwide. It’s that kind of experience that makes us uniquely placed to provide safety and security solutions for the transport sector.

We’re constantly thinking ahead to the next level of protection. For example, we’re part of the European eCall consortium, which is developing in-vehicle systems that automatically call emergency services in the event of an accident. The EU estimates that eCall will save 2,500 lives a year and could significantly reduce the severity of injuries in many accidents.

We’re also addressing the thorny issue of achieving a balance between rigorous security checks, passenger convenience and speed of boarding. We’ve pioneered automated and biometric border management, with automatic barriers linked to advanced biometric readers and smartcards. This allows travellers to move quickly and comfortably through airports or between countries – without compromising security.

Biometrics is now one of our core capabilities and we’re one of the world’s most experienced biometric implementers. Our systems are already used at football stadia, shopping malls, and many other places with a high concentration of people or high security demands.

In all our work on intelligent transport safety and security, we’re also aware that the data collected and transmitted by our systems has to be hacker-proof and can only be accessed by properly authorised personnel. For that reason, we set up the first cryptographic testing laboratory outside North America to meet the US government computing security standard Federal Information Processing Standardization (FIPS) 140.