IAEA Symposium on International Safeguards

Distributed Ledger Technology used in nuclear non-proliferation safeguards?

7 Nov 2018, 09:10

5m

M2 (Vienna International Centre)

Roundtable Member Leveraging technological advancements for safeguards applications (TEC) [TEC] Blockchain and Safeguards

Speaker

Dr Stefan Nonneman (European Commission - Joint Research Centre)

Description

Blockchain and more in general distributed ledger technologies are getting a lot of visibility in the financial world these days, being considered as real game-changers. However their recent evolutions (multi-channel ledgers, smart-contracts etc.) are still not well known and understood. They may have a huge potential changing also the way we will deal tomorrow with whatever type of transactions and transaction validation. Before using the technology or exploring its applications, the transposition of financial oriented distributed ledger concepts towards safeguards concepts should take place and the efficiency impact should be understood. Once the potential in the safeguards context have well been understood, the safeguards business processes should be analysed in detail in order to find the optimal places for implementing the technology and maximising the efficiency gain. A market survey will lead to a choice of the best solution to be used for the development of a real testbed for end-to end testing. How to evolve from a testbed, mimicking a specific and concrete situation towards analysing and concluding the usefulness in more general and overarching cases will be presented and discussed. Special attention will be paid towards encryption, robustness and immunity for cyber threads, automation, the efficient use of the block chain and smart contracts and scalability. The paper will present the methodology developed and used at JRC together with the first results and findings.