Security Against Impersonation Attacks in Distributed Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how adversaries can manipulate decision-making in distributed multi-agent systems, potentially destabilizing equilibria and affecting overall system behavior, highlighting vulnerabilities introduced by decentralization.

Contribution

It characterizes conditions under which local adversarial influence can significantly alter global system outcomes in graphical coordination games.

Findings

Adversarial influence can cascade and destabilize equilibria.

Conditions identified for when local attacks impact global behavior.

Analysis of vulnerabilities in distributed decision-making systems.

Abstract

In a multi-agent system, transitioning from a centralized to a distributed decision-making strategy can introduce vulnerability to adversarial manipulation. We study the potential for adversarial manipulation in a class of graphical coordination games where the adversary can pose as a friendly agent in the game, thereby influencing the decision-making rules of a subset of agents. The adversary's influence can cascade throughout the system, indirectly influencing other agents' behavior and significantly impacting the emergent collective behavior. The main results in this paper focus on characterizing conditions under which the adversary's local influence can dramatically impact the emergent global behavior, e.g., destabilize efficient Nash equilibria.