Structural Consensus in Networks with Directed Topologies and Its Cryptographic Implementation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel privacy-preserving consensus algorithm for directed networks, utilizing structural consensus and cryptographic techniques to ensure confidentiality against external and internal threats.

Contribution

It presents a new structural consensus framework for directed networks and implements a cryptographic controller to achieve privacy-preserving consensus.

Findings

Successfully formulated the structural consensus problem.

Derived solvability conditions for the controller.

Implemented a cryptographic controller to ensure confidentiality.

Abstract

The existing cryptosystem based approaches for privacy-preserving consensus of networked systems are usually limited to those with undirected topologies. This paper proposes a new privacy-preserving algorithm for networked systems with directed topologies to reach confidential consensus. As a prerequisite for applying the algorithm, a structural consensus problem is formulated and the solvability conditions are discussed for an explicitly constructed controller. The controller is then implemented with encryption to achieve consensus while avoiding individual's information leakage to external eavesdroppers and/or malicious internal neighbors.