[Cryptography] Blockchain to Secure Nuclear Weapons?

[Peter Todd]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 09:23:23PM +0100, ianG wrote:
> On 11/10/2016 15:12, Jim Windle wrote:
> >DARPA looking at uses of blockchain technology, including securing
> >nuclear weapons.
> >
> >http://qz.com/801640/darpa-blockchain-a-blockchain-from-guardtime-is-being-verified-by-galois-under-a-government-contract/
> 
> While I don't know for sure, it's not clear to me that Guardtime technology
> is blockchain.  It's more like hashchain, but that is something that has
> been discussed many times going back to the early 1990s.

Unless Guardtime has changed their product lately, I'd say they're 100% not a
blockchain because they're only timestamping; Guardtime's service doesn't prove
uniqueness.

For securing nuclear weapons this is the difference between knowing someone
claims a weapon is located at X, and knowing that the *only* claims made say
the weapon is at X... Suffice to say, "double-spending" nuclear weapons records
is bad, and Guardtime's technology is insufficient to robustly protect against
it.

This is similar to how Certificate Transparency must be more than just
timestamping to give the auditability guarantees it attempts to provide.

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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