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Arms Control Opportunities for Inherently Safe and Secure Nuclear Command Control and Communications

Forden, Geoffrey E.

The Department of Defense Science Board has stated that the United States is "not prepared to defend againsr cyber-attacks and that the military could lose "trust in the information and ability to control U.S. systems and forces [including nuclear forces]." One potential weak spot in cyber-security is storing encryption keys in computer memory. This paper explores the use of hardware devices (so-called Physical Unclonable Functions, or PUFs) to generate, in the nuclear weapon itself, unique encryption keys each time they are needed. Not only do we find that this has the potential to mitigate a number of cyberthreats, but such hardware has the potential to greatly diminish the total uncertainty associated with radiation-based warhead authentication procedures; a procedure many analysts feel will be key to future arms control regimes. After outline the use of PUFs in nuclear command, control, and communications--and indicating some of the areas that still require further research--we discuss their application to arms control and warhead authentication

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TYPE SAND Report YEAR 2019
OSTIDOI

Lessons from Past Nuclear Disarmament: What Worked What Did Not

Forden, Geoffrey E.

This report studies the efforts of the international community and the United States to verif)/ the denuclearization of various countries: Ukraine, South Africa, Iraq, Taiwan, and Libya. In doing so, it considers the verification of nuclear warhead destruction and the accounting of nuclear materials. Each case study contributes to the understanding we have of which verification procedures worked and which did not and what factors contributed to that success and which did not. The most important factor contributing to successful verification is the cooperation of the subject country. If a country has made the strategic decision to cooperate, then it is possible that verification can be successful. If the country chooses not to cooperate, verification might rest on random and unpredictable events. This unpredictability of verification is politically unacceptable. Even if verification is judged to be successful by the implementing agencies, outsiders can cast doubts on it by pointing out small and potentially unavoidable errors in material amounts verified. It is vitally important to systematically preserve forensic evidence, especially shipping and receiving records to avoid just such issues. Historically, such records are the most important evidence in verifying denuclearization. Technology is far less important than forensic analysis of records. It does play a supporting role in verifying some declarations but there can be an enormous delay in drawing conclusions caused by the necessity to analyze statistically large samples of materials. The confidence one gets from such analysis can be delayed well past the time it is politically significant. The most important advance in technology would be to accelerate that sample analysis process.

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TYPE SAND Report YEAR 2018
OSTIDOI

Resilience of Adapting Networks: Results from a Stylized Infrastructure Model

Beyeler, Walter E.; Vugrin, Eric D.; Forden, Geoffrey E.; Aamir, Munaf S.; Verzi, Stephen J.; Outkin, Alexander V.

Adaptation is believed to be a source of resilience in systems. It has been difficult to measure the contribution of adaptation to resilience, unlike other resilience mechanisms such as restoration and recovery. One difficulty comes from treating adaptation as a deus ex machina that is interjected after a disruption. This provides no basis for bounding possible adaptive responses. We can bracket the possible effects of adaptation when we recognize that it occurs continuously, and is in part responsible for the current system’s properties. In this way the dynamics of the system’s pre-disruption structure provides information about post-disruption adaptive reaction. Seen as an ongoing process, adaptation has been argued to produce “robust-yet-fragile” systems. Such systems perform well under historical stresses but become committed to specific features of those stresses in a way that makes them vulnerable to system-level collapse when those features change. In effect adaptation lessens the cost of disruptions within a certain historical range, at the expense of increased cost from disruptions outside that range. Historical adaptive responses leave a signature in the structure of the system. Studies of ecological networks have suggested structural metrics that pick out systemic resilience in the underlying ecosystems. If these metrics are generally reliable indicators of resilience they provide another strategy for gaging adaptive resilience. To progress in understanding how the process of adaptation and the property of resilience interrelate in infrastructure systems, we pose some specific questions: Does adaptation confer resilience?; Does it confer resilience to novel shocks as well, or does it tune the system to fragility?; Can structural features predict resilience to novel shocks?; Are there policies or constraints on the adaptive process that improve resilience?.

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TYPE Journal Article YEAR 2015
OSTI

Strip2CubeFace user%3CU%2B2019%3Es manual

Forden, Geoffrey E.

Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) software for producing linked virtual tours based on 360 degree panoramas are becoming more and more available. However, the best current products for taking the images, stitching them into 360 degree panoramas, and then linking them together into complex virtual tours require different and incompatible input and output formats. This program is designed to bridge the gap between the iPix Interactive Studio export format, which consists of a single JPEG with the six faces of a cube connected horizontally, with the six individual JPEGs needed to be imported into Panotour Pro software. This report describes how to use the software program Strip2CubeFace, which takes the cube-strip JPEG exported from iPix Studio and coverts it into six JPEGs representing the six cube faces that Panotour Pro imports. As such, it represents a necessary link between the two COTS software programs key to making virtual tours quickly and easily. It becomes one member of the suite of software programs known as %E2%80%9CRaPP-TOURS%E2%80%9D or Rapid Processing of PanoTours Software necessary to simulate managed access and other permission requesting arms control-type training exercises.

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TYPE SAND Report YEAR 2013
OSTIDOI

Areas for US-India civilian nuclear cooperation to prevent/mitigate radiological events

Forden, Geoffrey E.

Over the decades, India and the United States have had very little formal collaboration on nuclear issues. Partly this was because neither country needed collaboration to make progress in the nuclear field. But it was also due, in part, to the concerns both countries had about the others intentions. Now that the U.S.-India Deal on nuclear collaboration has been signed and the Hyde Act passed in the United States, it is possible to recognize that both countries can benefit from such nuclear collaboration, especially if it starts with issues important to both countries that do not touch on strategic systems. Fortunately, there are many noncontroversial areas for collaboration. This study, funded by the U.S. State Department, has identified a number of areas in the prevention of and response to radiological incidents where such collaboration could take place.

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TYPE SAND Report YEAR 2013
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35 Results
35 Results