Vintage electronics for verified dismantlement of nuclear weapons (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Vintage electronics for verified dismantlement of nuclear weapons (2019)

osti.gov

32 pointsrbanffy7 comments

I'm trying to understand how this solves the trust problem. Let's suppose the Americans are visiting Russia to inspect some Russian weapons as part of a treaty. The Americans show up with their detectors built around the 6502 processor. Even though it's allegedly a simple design, are the Russians going to trust that the Americans haven't hidden something more sophisticated inside the 6502's DIP package to collect more info than they're supposed to? If you have an unlimited budget, you could manufacture something that looks just like a vintage 6502, but has lots of secret capability inside.

The same problem exists if the Russian's supply the detectors to the Americans. Will the Americans trust that the Russians haven't created a 6502 package that's capable of cheating the test?

I'm imagining a possible solution as follows: The Americans go to Russia with 5 identical detection systems. The Russians randomly choose 4 systems to destructively analyze (X-ray or decapsulation of 6502, etc.). When the Russians are satisfied that the 6502 is real and isn't hiding any extra features in any of the 4 systems they test, the Americans are allowed to proceed with the inspection using their one remaining detection system.

Is that how it's supposed to work in practice?

It would be trivial to x-ray it and verify - at the given scale and component count, anything unwanted would be glaringly obvious. You wouldn’t even have to just do a sample, as the time to analyse would be short, and the total number of units finite - do all of them.

Destructively inspecting an Apple II should be considered a crime against humanity

AFAIK the eastern block cloned 6502 and many other western chips, so analyzing such a device could be pretty easy in practice due to a lot of "experience". ;-)

> If you have an unlimited budget, you could manufacture something that looks just like a vintage 6502

In 2020, If I have a hobbyist's budget I can manufacture something like that. It wouldn't stand up to intense scrutiny, but to the casual observer there wouldn't be a noticeable difference.

Not taking away from your point, but showing that it's even easier to hide electronics than most people think it is.

My recollection from last time I looked at this was that the point of choosing the 6502 is that it was produced in such quantity that there's still plenty of old stock available. Meaning that trust could be reinforced by having the Americans and Russians go together to a second hand shop, where they buy a vintage machine off the shelf.

To cheat the system would then require you to not only manufacturing a fake machine, but also place it in the shop, and convince your foreign counterpart to buy and trust that particular machine. If they insist on buying several machines from random stores around the country, then it becomes increasingly unlikely that you're going to be able to get away with cheating.

Whilst a fun idea to explore... Bit of a reach :-) LOL

There's something about that old hardware still, probably a lot of us here fondly recall those days.

Would I seriously consider using this hardware for any mission critical project... nah (and I know, the Dharma Initiative had great success with one and all; still.)

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