Did you know that several nations still use paper-based methods to record nuclear material transactions? The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is eager to enhance the nuclear safeguards that monitor any fissile nuclear material that may move into covert weapons projects and be used to manufacture bombs, even if that is not the situation in Australia.
The IAEA submits reports to the UN and supports member states in the secure, peaceful use of nuclear energy while halting the spread of nuclear weapons. Each IAEA member state now has a regulator that must comply with reporting requirements for nuclear material. This reporting helps the IAEA undertake inspections to confirm that a country’s nuclear activities are consistent with its declared purpose and provide proof of this.
It may be simpler to rewrite or alter historical records when the physical archives are replaced as more record-keeping transitions to electronic systems under the continuous constraints of efficiency and fixed budget allocations in governments and at the IAEA. Due to this, audibility is now more important than ever, along with information security and effectiveness. The IAEA’s mission and the national regulators who support its crucial work depend on constant innovation in nuclear safety.
To identify challenges and opportunities under the rapidly changing operating environment that we currently see, regulatory authorities, governments, the research and development community, and industry will come together at the upcoming IAEA Symposium on International Safeguards, which is held every four years.
We will present research at the symposium in Vienna, Austria, that suggests using blockchain technology to share an immutable ledger of accounting information for nuclear material among all member states as well as with the IAEA itself could significantly increase the difficulty of falsifying electronic records in an attempt to divert funds.
A secure platform for exchanging private reports is offered by this proof-of-concept system, known as Shared Ledger Implementation of Nuclear Material Accounting and Control (SLINMAC), in addition to an authoritative, auditable shared ledger of all transactions. For both domestic and foreign shipments of nuclear material, SLINMAC is intended to supplement current reporting procedures and increase the effectiveness of transit matching.
criteria for nuclear information security
“Information security not only includes ensuring the confidentiality of information but also includes ensuring the accuracy and completeness of the information (its integrity) and the accessibility or usability of the information on demand (its availability),” the IAEA’s Security of Nuclear Information Implementing Guide states.
The exceptional data integrity that is offered by the cryptographic linking of blocks with self-referential hashes is a significant benefit of blockchain technology. Editing a committed block to commit fraud breaks this chain and would need an unreasonable amount of computer resources to reconstruct the false entries.
Since blockchain storage is decentralised, data is readily available and quickly comprehensible. As soon as a transaction is approved, the blockchain is updated, and several copies of the ledger are disseminated across all nodes, enhancing the network’s resilience in the event of a security breach. A basic open blockchain does not by default ensure secrecy since all parties may see the ledger maintained on their nodes, even though blockchain offers a robust mechanism for monitoring nuclear material where the digital record cannot be modified.
This is a concern since there are legitimate reasons for keeping certain information like nuclear security, intellectual property utilised for clean energy, or nuclear medicine confidential. The answer is to encrypt nuclear security data both before it is entered into the ledger and while it is being transferred to and from the blockchain. Additionally, the encryption must provide the long-term preservation of data during the duration of the underlying asset, which might be thousands of years in the case of managing nuclear waste. The great integrity and accessibility of blockchain records particularly stand out in this scenario.
The main accomplishment of SLINMAC is to examine how the auditability of the system is impacted by end-to-end encryption, which is necessary for blockchain to satisfy nuclear security standards. The multicast encryption protocol used by SLINMAC enables many organisations to decode a single piece of data and confirm each other’s access. This is crucial when the IAEA, the State regulatory agency, and nuclear plants all need to receive the same report.
We appreciate the chance to talk about SLINMAC at the conference as well as the more general ideas as research into utilising blockchain to monitor nuclear material is still in its early stages. This study expands upon the first blockchain demonstration of a safeguards information system, named “SLUMBAT,” which we presented at the last Safeguards Symposium in 2018 and which inspired the 2020 SLAFKA project with UNSW, the Finnish national agency STUK, and the Stimson Center.
The IPCC generally agrees that more nuclear energy must be produced globally to achieve decarbonization goals over the next 30 years and beyond. The safeguards community will need new technology, like blockchain, to expand its efficiency without sacrificing security and auditability to handle the growing number of safeguards transactions necessary for this to happen.
We think that innovations like SLINMAC will boost public trust in the nuclear sector as a whole and open up new opportunities for innovative technical collaboration amongst the communities of information security, blockchain, and nuclear safety. We want to make sure that nuclear energy is generated safely, which depends in part on the security of data about nuclear material as well as the openness and auditability of the nuclear supply chain.
SLINMAC depicts a portion of the potential future.
The IPCC generally agrees that more nuclear energy must be produced globally to achieve decarbonization goals over the next 30 years and beyond. The safeguards community will need new technology, like blockchain, to expand its efficiency without sacrificing security and auditability to handle the growing number of safeguards transactions necessary for this to happen.
We think that innovations like SLINMAC will boost public trust in the nuclear sector as a whole and open up new opportunities for innovative technical collaboration amongst the communities of information security, blockchain, and nuclear safety. We want to make sure that nuclear energy is generated safely, which depends in part on the security of data pertaining to nuclear material as well as the openness and auditability of the nuclear supply chain.
SLINMAC depicts a portion of the potential future.
