An Application of Unattended and Remote Monitoring to Sensitive Systems

Unattended and remote monitoring has proven to be an effective way to reduce the cost of inspection activities, as well as the impact of inspections on a facility. Recently, remote transmission of data over the internet has become more cost-effective and is an attractive option to reduce travel to a facility and thus further reduce costs. In some cases, however, the data collected by these systems are deemed classified or sensitive by the host country, and under such circumstances the data cannot be transmitted. This is a type of catch-22 situation where the host country may have acceptable means to transmit classified data, but that means is itself classified and cannot be shared. Unattended systems sometimes fail, and after such a failure an inspector may discover that months of safeguards information have been lost. If state-of-health information can be remotely transmitted, such a failure can be detected in a more timely manner and less data will be lost. When classified data are involved, however, a host may be reluctant to allow the transmittal of this type of information because of the potential that this transmission route could provide unauthorized access to the sensitive data. In this paper we discuss an application of the information barrier concept that may allow an inspector to have access to information from the unattended system while giving the host assurances that no classified data are being transmitted.