Empty Room
Fisseha Aranda
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There was a range of answers, and I'll break them all down before giving you my own thoughts. Some people totally overthought it, some people didn't think at all. Nobody quite got it to my own satisfaction, although there were some great comments and there are some exceptionally smart people out there in my network.
The lowest quality answers were naturally the most obvious stuff - lock the doors, bar the windows etc. For these people, security is only what is most obvious, and so any thought exercise is going to be a challenge for them. I'm thinking specifically of the person who proudly bears his CPP certification but couldn't cope with being told he was wrong. For clarity, there isn't more than one right answer here, and those CPP guys are generally a great advert for not investing in that shit if that is their belief. Security risk management is founded on principles that do not change. Maybe the CPP exam has more than one right answer, which would explain a lot.
The next level of answer was likewise limited by the obvious. 'If it's an empty room, there is no asset'. Wrong. The room itself is the asset. This whole question is about asset identification. If we cannot understand what needs protecting and why, the rest of the process isn't worth completing.
So we know the room is the asset. Is that the end of the conversation? Not at all. We need to know who owns the room since they are the person responsible for making any decisions about investing in its protection. Asset ownership is a whole other organisational problem that I am not going into here. When we know who owns the room, we need to understand the context of the asset.
All the best answers came from the more thoughtful sections of my network, who all started asking questions around context. We all know that the first stage in security risk management is establishing context, not running around putting controls in place for seemingly obvious problems. We do all know that, right?
Now we can accept that the room has value, as does the building it is located in. To understand that value, we can begin at the basic level by asking how much it is insured for. All security risk needs to be communicated in financial terms, so let's start there as the easy option. Is it the only room that the owner has, perhaps making it a more critical asset than if they had a hundred? Beyond that, we need to understand something that most people missed related to context.
What will the room be used for? Specifically, what will the room be used for that can create value for the owner? Are we going to use it to conduct weddings or sell alcohol? These are regulated activities in most places, so we are now understanding the legal risks associated with the use of the room, which will in turn influence our protective decisions. With me so far?
Some people draw a crown, or a tree or a bag of cash. The correct answer is a person. Money shows up in our lives in the shape of people, and the power of our relationships is what allows them to transfer it to us. People don't have money problems, they have relationship problems. Often, in their relationship with money, funny enough.
Now if our room owner wants to get value from their room, they are going to need to allow people to interact with it. Maybe they'll rent it, use it as storage, whatever. The owner of the room will want to maximise the benefit from their asset. They are going to want as many people as possible to be able to get into the room and use it, and all the time. This creates a massive security headache, and just locking it down will harm the owner. It'll be so secure that even money can't get in.
We could easily be talking about data at this point in time. Everyone wants to access it now, from everywhere, all the time and fast. How do you secure something with those business access requirements? You can see now that if you are just running around putting controls in place, you have a lot to learn. Security is for people who think, not people who think they think.
Now, we know there are legal restrictions on what the room can be used for, so we're going to need to start with policies about what is and is not allowed. What behaviours are allowed in the room? When? During what times? What objects can they bring into the room with them? It's easy to start with compliance since most asset owners will understand it.
Then we look outside. Who else might want to get in and disrupt whatever the room is being used for? Some people on the thread started regurgitating their step by step process without really thinking about it. There is no point in doing a threat assessment if you haven't understood your assets, and many threat assessments are works of fantasy anyway.
Remember that security is a people problem, specifically linked to their behaviour. We'll create a list of the kinds of people who might interfere with our room and the benefits we will get from it, and then create a list of the kinds of behaviours that they may engage in. We'll call these risk scenarios. We'll do a BIA. Then we'll risk assess them. That is another conversation entirely but be sure it isn't going to done using fucking colours or numbers from 1 to 5. There is a lot more in here to discuss but that is not the point of this article.
Now if security is a problem of human behaviour, we need to influence it. The tool for that is policy, which is the root of all control and so we'll start there. We'll need policies for who can come in, how they get access, how they act and so on. When we have a policy framework in place, we have the starting point for the rest of the controls that we may need.
My point? Most people just looked at the room without thinking. Our mission is not to secure our organisations. We can't. We never have the resources or the organisational influence and authority to do so. Our mission is to influence organisational conditions so that the organisation has a secure production capability for the creation of protected value. That requires thinking beyond the obvious. If you can't follow the intellectual process for securing an empty room, you can't 'secure' anything else.
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If other rooms in the home have already been decorated, use a similar style and color palette. Especially if the home is open concept. The adjacent space in this home had grays and navys and a nice balance of modern lines with some vintage traditional pieces mixed in. I used that as guidance when sourcing the furniture. The chairs and desk are definitely more modern, but the piano and bookshelves are more traditional.
Bring you floor plan, your collection of inspiration and ideas, and use them to find specific pieces. Check the measurements of the pieces against the floor plan measurements to be sure things will fit comfortably.
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What if I created an illusion that was partially-empty space, like a 5x5 cube of swiss cheese? Would it seem like there was a swiss cheese cube formed around my person or could my 'fake-empty-space-image' fill the holes?
It comes down to whether that the space inside the illusion is filled with air is a phenomenon. Even if we accept that it is, this illusion has to change relative to the viewer, which would require precise calculations from the caster and would be essentially impossible against more than one observer.
My personal ruling would be that this is an abuse of the spell and not allowed. It is much more streamlined and easier to handle this way. If a PC wants to be invisible, there is already a spell for it and not even that high level.
Of course you can, just not a very good one. Since you're limited to illusory "objects," it's going to be, like you suggested, pretty much the same as your "sheet with a [photorealistic] picture of an empty room" only you've got one sheet on each side of an illusory cube.
Such an illusion would be roughly comparable to things like the chalk artists who draw pictures of holes and other impressive things on the sidewalk. Extremely believable when viewed from the intended angle, but stepping too far to one side or another results in the parallax giving it away almost immediately. If using a spell that allows the illusion to be altered on an ongoing basis you might be able to track a person or small group and adjust it to continuously be what they expect to see, but it's not going to be an easy thing to do and will become close to impossible if they split up.
How successful this would be as a tactic will be highly dependent on placement. Near a wall would work OK as the parallax will be minimized. And the further away from the observer the harder it will be to spot. In a room with say polished obsidian walls and floors where there aren't any distinguishing characteristics for the eye to use to see the parallax it might even hold up to anything short of someone walking into it.
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