Historically, arms control agreements have been negotiated with relatively simple means of counting warheads. Treaty accountable items are manifestations of closely held nuclear secrets, and sophisticated analysis techniques risk exposing those secrets to a treaty partner’s inspectors. Information barriers pose one solution to the challenge of protecting a nation’s private data, but typically require custom hardware, constrained processing ability, and inconvenient limitations on how and where data is processed. However, modern advances in privacy-preserving computational algorithms rooted in cryptography present an alternative to the classic information barrier. A simple prototype has been developed at Sandia National Laboratories to collect nominally sensitive data from a mock treaty accountable item, record that information as non-sensitive encrypted outputs, and allow inspectors to subsequently evaluate that information at a time and location of their choice without any risk of the host party’s data being inadvertently (or maliciously) revealed. Based on provably secure, cryptographic privacy-preserving computations, the demonstrated technology offers a transparent and trustworthy method of performing analysis that is both authenticatable and certifiable, and which can use the unique tools already available to nuclear inspectors in order to provide confidence in the data collection and encryption processes. Ultimately, the technology serves as a proof-of-concept that future arms control technologies might offer at least the same level of discriminating power while simultaneously adding convenience and reducing the burden of inspectors. Beyond that, the technology presents an opportunity for more sophisticated calculations to be both possible and palatable options in a future arms control negotiations and treaties.
Year
2024
Abstract