Disarmament Hacking 2.0 : Toward a Trusted, Open-Hardware Computing Platform for Nuclear Warhead Verification

Trusted inspection systems are critical for the verification of future arms- control treaties involving measurements on nuclear warheads or classified nuclear warhead components. Over the years, several research efforts have produced a number of prototype systems exploring a range of different technologies and conceptual approaches to accomplish this task. In general, these systems rely on unique hardware and software. In order to au- thenticate inspection systems, however, it would be beneficial to use a common, intensively tested hardware and software toolkit—possibly even use the same platform for different mea- surement types and verification tasks. Here, we propose and examine an inspection system based on a particularly versatile single-board computer, the Red Pitaya platform. As a case study, we build and test a prototype information barrier based on the template-matching approach using passive gamma spectroscopy. The Red Pitaya has very fast analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) capabilities combined with Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) sig- nal processing, which allows us to reduce the number of components between scintillator and spectrum output. Our results demonstrate that choosing common computing platforms may be possible and should help define the required specifications of such a platform for broad adoption.