A security architecture for monitoring a nuclear test-ban treaty

Abstract

For a long time, an effort to achieve a comprehensive nuclear test-ban treaty banning all nuclear explosions world-wide has been made. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) is the result of this effort.

A monitoring regime, which is to assist the participating countries in verifying compliance with the Treaty, is being set up by a preparatory commission. To protect the data from a global network of monitoring stations (the IMS network), digital signatures are applied, and a public key infrastructure (PKI) has been set up to accommodate key exchange.

In this thesis, we will describe the IMS network, the proposed security architecture, its protocols and the PKI. We also make a threat analysis for the system.

We have designed and implemented an application, imsparse, for one part of the security scheme: receiving and executing commands at the monitoring stations.

Finally, we have commented on the appropriateness of the proposed architecture, and how it meets the threats we defined.

Our conclusion is that most of the threats are dealt with by the implementation of this security scheme, but the physical securing of the sensors may cause problems.