Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd: Hardware and Software Challenges for Nuclear Disarmament Verification

The verification of nuclear disarmament will require the use of adequate mea- surement technologies. All will need to enable inspecting parties to trust the measurement chain leading to valid and correct results, while ensuring host coun- tries that classified information–especially warhead-design information–remains secure. However, this seems particularly difficult with technologies that rely heav- ily on electronics and software such as most radiation measurement system. Crowdsourcing and open-source challenges are a potential source of innovation to address this issue. This paper presents results from verification challenges ex- periments that were conducted in a classroom environment. Tasks included the development of simple information barriers and possible exploits for measurement electronics. From the results, the paper highlights requirements and propose ideas to scale-up those challenges from the classroom to larger audiences.