Fiber-Optic Quantum Seal

We report on our development of the fiber-optic quantum seal (FOQS) which will provide high-sensitivity detection capabilities for tamper events at bulk storage facilities to enhance Safeguards verification efforts. Long-term verification of critical assets in storage facilities for the containment and surveillance mission area must provide nuclear material accountancy with assurance of security and continuity of knowledge. As a part of this effort, future monitoring systems may incorporate networked distributed sensors to perform status checks on individual or collection of containers. FOQC enhances current practices by making use of quantum optical probes to enable channel integrity checks and sensor data authentication. Encoded light pulses in the fiber channels will monitor for intrusions while decoding of these pulses will provide data authentication. FOQS consists of an interferometric quantum transceiver which transmits randomly encoded packets of photons over a fiber loop used to seal a container. These photon packets return to the receiver to be decoded for amplitude and phase information. Comparisons of the transmit and receive signals allow for the characterization of the channel. If the comparison shows high degree of correlation, channel integrity and authentication are deemed true, while a lack of correlation triggers an intrusion alarm. The key advantage that FOQS has is that the quantum probes are governed by the uncertainty principle which prevents the intruder from attacking the channel without leaving a trace. This trace will be used to detect the attack attempt. Experimental work will be discussed for the seal development, and theoretical analysis for enhanced security will be presented in the hypothesis-test framework. Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC (NTESS), for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.