Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences Research performs extensive research in nuclear arms control monitoring and safeguards.  In recent years, this work has been funded largely via National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation. These projects include collaborations with academic, vendor, and utility partners. 

Highlights of Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences’ cybersecurity research activities in cybersecurity for nuclear arms control monitoring and safeguards include:

• A reliable multicast protocol. created to set up the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty verification network, an international network connecting 321 monitoring stations around the world. The goal was to monitor in real-time whether there were activities that could be the result of nuclear weapon testing. LBNL’s role in the project examined the feasibility of using multicast in the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) network, monitoring for signs of explosions.

• Provided reliable multicast to provide remote experiment access to Advanced Light Source (ALS) Beamline 7.

• An approach to detect tampering of nuclear arms monitoring equipment (“authentication”) located in foreign host countries using differential fuzz testing.

Key Representative Publications:

Jayson R. Vavrek, Luozhong Zhou, Joshua Boverhof, Elisa R. Heymann, Barton P. Miller, and Sean Peisert. Differential Fuzz Testing to Detect Tampering In Sensor Systems and its Application to Arms Control Authentication, arXiv preprint 2404.05946, 9 Apr 2024.

Deborah A. Agarwal. Discussion Of Reliable Multicast Deployment Progress For The Continuous Data Protocol. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual DoD/DOE Seismic Research Review: Worldwide Monitoring of Nuclear Explosions, Jackson Hole, WY, Oct. 2001.

Deborah Agarwal, Richard Stead, Brian Coan, James E Burns, Nishith Shah, and Nicholas Kyriakopoulos. Initial results of the CD-1 reliable multicast experiment. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2000.

Projects