Secure Consensus via Objective Coding: Robustness Analysis to Channel Tampering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a secure consensus method for multiagent networks using objective coding, enhancing robustness against channel tampering through encrypted task broadcasting and advanced decoding, with theoretical and numerical validation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel secure-by-design consensus framework employing objective coding and information localization to improve robustness against channel tampering in multiagent systems.

Findings

Robustness to channel tampering is theoretically validated.

A tradeoff between coding capability and network robustness is identified.

Numerical simulations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Abstract

This work mainly addresses continuous-time multiagent consensus networks where an adverse attacker affects the convergence performances of said protocol. In particular, we develop a novel secure-by-design approach in which the presence of a network manager monitors the system and broadcasts encrypted tasks (i.e., hidden edge weight assignments) to the agents involved. Each agent is then expected to decode the received codeword containing data on the task through appropriate decoding functions by leveraging advanced security principles, such as objective coding and information localization. Within this framework, a stability analysis is conducted for showing the robustness to channel tampering in the scenario where part of the codeword corresponding to a single link in the system is corrupted. A tradeoff between objective coding capability and network robustness is also pointed out. To support these novelties, an application example on decentralized estimation is provided. Moreover, an investigation of the robust agreement is as well extended in the discrete-time domain. Further numerical simulations are given to validate the theoretical results in both the time domains.