Development of a General, Modular, Reprogrammable Information Barrier for Arms Control
Applications

Next-generation treaty verification will require a wide range of enabling capabilities to support future transparency in monitoring systems. Trusted capabilities must be developed to support inspections, monitoring, and confirmation of warheads while protecting sensitive information such as warhead design and facility operations. Prior trusted system development efforts have often incorporated information barriers (IBs), which help address host certification concerns (safety and security of equipment used in host facilities) but make authentication (inspector process to gain trust in monitoring equipment) challenging. For all but the simplest of measurements, some type of complex processing device is required to operate the system and process acquired data. This complexity makes authentication and certification of measurement systems and collected data challenging and time consuming. To meet that challenge, we present our development of a general-purpose, extrinsic information barrier that will protect against the release of sensitive information collected from sensor measurements while providing inspectors confidence in the measurement results. Our design will use a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to operate the system, which provides the requisite flexibility for all required operations while reducing extraneous functionality found in a microprocessor that could potentially be exploited. By developing hardware that can serve as an information barrier for a range of different verification measurements, we will eliminate the need to develop authentication and certification procedures for multiple independent systems. Additionally, because it is reprogrammable, we will be able to leverage the same IB hardware for systems with different sensors and facilitate the reuse of firmware portions that are more generally applicable (such as waveform processing), further streamlining authentication and certification procedures.