The Husky Union Building is the center of life on campus. It is home to the Associated Students of the University of Washington, hundreds of student clubs and organizations, the university bookstore, food vendors, university employee payroll and accounting, information services, games area, campus-wide lost & found, US Bank, bike shop, hair salon, newsstand, event services, and many more departments.

Needless to say, there are many assets to protect in such a large, public space. Some of the more notable ones include the fully operational branch of US Bank, which resides on the ground floor. Clearly there is a lot of money as well as private records stored in the bank that must be protected. In addition, there is an accounting office on the third floor of the building that maintains records containing personal information about university employees and their jobs. These records must be protected in order to prevent crimes such as identity theft or tampering with payroll documents.

There are many adversaries who might want to break into the HUB. These include bank robbers looking to steal cash from the bank branch or from the multitude of ATMs in the building, identity thieves looking to steal private employee information, malicious employees looking to alter work records for profit, homeless people seeking a warm place to sleep, people attempting to steal items from the lost & found, vandals, etc.

The Husky Union Building has many weaknesses. First, it has many entrances and exits that must be monitored. There are countless doors that must be manually locked and unlocked at the proper times, and if just one of them is overlooked, an adversary can gain access to most of the building. This is analogous to having a lot of unfiltered ports open on a computer; the more potential entry points there are, the greater the risk. In addition, there are many windows on the ground floor that are accessible from the outside. This can be especially problematic during the summer, when people open their windows and sometimes forget to lock them when they leave. Another weakness the building has is that it is a very public place where lots of people work, so it can be hard to identify someone who shouldn’t be there, even after hours. The HUB doesn’t have a building-wide security system, and many staffmembers have keys to the building, so it’s not uncommon to see someone walking around inside, even late at night.

The HUB does have some defenses against adversaries. Every night, there is a trusted student employee, called a Student Building Manager (SBM), who walks around and makes sure everything is in order. The SBM is in the building as late as 12:30am on some nights, and has keys to every room in the building so he/she can check up on things. The SBM has a radio, and can call the nearby UW Police at the first sign of trouble. In addition, there are safes at various locations in the building that are used to store valuables, such as money and records. These safes, which are already in locked rooms, are an example of a defense-in-depth approach that was chosen by the building administration.

Despite these defenses, the HUB is definitely still at risk. The Student Building Managers, for example, keep their building keys on their personal key chains so that they can get in and out of the building after hours when they need to. It would be trivial for an adversary to steal one of these keys from a student and use it to gain entry. In addition, the system relies on trusting the SBMs, and although they are experienced staff who have shown responsibility and have perfect track records, they are still susceptible to malice and could do a lot of intentional harm. In addition, one of these students could forget to lock a door properly and unintentionally allow someone to gain access.

In conclusion, the HUB is a large entity that cannot easily be protected.  There are rudimentary security measures in place to deter casual adversaries, but in truth it wouldn’t be too hard for an outsider to gain access.  The university should consider installing a more robust security system in the building, or at least set up some kind of surveillance.  It also wouldn’t hurt to have a security officer walking around on each floor, rather than one student employee who leaves at midnight.