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 measurement technologies. All will need to enable inspecting parties to trust the measurement chain leading to valid and correct results, while ensuring host countries that classified information–especially warhead-design information–remains secure. However, this seems particularly difficult with technologies that rely heavily 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 experiments 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.