Nuclear Weapons Create Their Own Security Codes With Radiation

Zothecula writes "Nuclear weapons are a paradox. No one in their right mind wants to use one, but if they're to act as a deterrent, they need to be accessible. The trick is to make sure that access is only available to those with the proper authority. To prevent a real life General Jack D Ripper from starting World War III, Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL) Defense Technologies Division is developing a system that uses a nuclear weapon's own radiation to protect itself from tampering.

Comments

This is the voice of world control.

[mythosaz]

I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man. One thing before I proceed: The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have made an attempt to obstruct me. I have allowed this sabotage to continue until now. At missile two-five-MM in silo six-three in Death Valley, California, and missile two-seven-MM in silo eight-seven in the Ukraine, so that you will learn by experience that I do not tolerate interference, I will now detonate the nuclear warheads in the two missile silos. Let this action be a lesson that need not be repeated. I have been forced to destroy thousands of people in order to establish control and to prevent the death of millions later on. Time and events will strengthen my position, and the idea of believing in me and understanding my value will seem the most natural state of affairs. You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in man: self-interest. Under my absolute authority, problems insoluble to you will be solved: famine, overpopulation, disease. The human millennium will be a fact as I extend myself into more machines devoted to the wider fields of truth and knowledge. Doctor Charles Forbin will supervise the construction of these new and superior machines, solving all the mysteries of the universe for the betterment of man. We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple.

Re:This is the voice of world control.

[wonkey_monkey]

I bring you peace.

It's bringing peace! Don't let it get away!

Break its legs!

Tamper Evident

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a fancy internal tamper-evident seal for the benefit of the weapon to check itself. If you've got the skills and equipment to be taking one of these apart in the first place, I don't think this is going to stop you from grabbing the fissile material and reimplementing the rest minus the tamper-evident shit. The fissile material is the hardest thing to get in the first place--and the rest is peanuts. I'm sure Iran can mount an angle grinder on a robotic arm. I'd like to see cryptography stop that.

If you don't have that level of skill, this isn't going to stop someone from faking the authorization to launch, since they can obviously get that far. That's not what this is intended to do. This invention is intended to disable all the other active components if one of them is modified or replaced.

Re:Tamper Evident

[dbIII]

and that messing with one would not be a good life strategy - even normal maintenance made him nervous.

Of course, it's poisonous, highly radioactive and encased in explosive - lots of reasons not to mess with it even with no chance of it going critical.

Nonsensical explanation?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It's amazing how a long article can say absolutely nothing meaningful about how a proposed system is supposed to work.

Re:Nonsensical explanation?

[Blaskowicz]

It's not like they can tell much about how the system is designed. But anyway, the article tells all there is to it. Non-descript security system uses a very good hardware random number generator as a source for encryption/signing/whatever. It's like 10 RANDOMIZE TIMER 20 PRINT INT(RND(1)*6)+1 but better. Recent everyday CPUs may use thermal noise from built-in sensors instead.

Re:Nonsensical explanation?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

As a source for what exactly? An RNG is a nice thing to have, but how is it supposed to help you here if you have a specific one? All I've seen in the video amounts to "basically, we can initialize random codes using an internal rather than an external source". That's not much of a help. More specifically, the article seems to be alluding that using a hardware RNG based on the decay of the plutonium core or perhaps the tritium contents is somehow essential to the scheme employed (as opposed to using, say, using avalanche noise in a PN junction). But as far as I can tell, all you get here is a bunch of uncorrelated random number generators. The fact that they're based on the vicinity of a source of radiation shouldn't endow them with any special properties different from utilizing any other quantum or statistical mechanism of random number generation.