A Robustness Analysis to Structured Channel Tampering Over Secure-by-Design Consensus Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the robustness of secure consensus networks against structured channel tampering, providing guarantees on agreement despite multiple link attacks and proposing methods to enhance encryption and stability.

Contribution

It generalizes previous work by offering robustness guarantees for multi-link attacks and introduces a stability analysis for edge weight tampering in secure consensus networks.

Findings

Guarantees on agents' agreement under multi-link attacks

Stability analysis demonstrating robustness to channel tampering

Numerical examples validating the proposed methods

Abstract

This work addresses multi-agent consensus networks where adverse attackers affect the convergence performances of the protocol by manipulating the edge weights. We generalize (Fabris and Zelazo, 2022) and provide guarantees on the agents' agreement in the presence of attacks on multiple links in the network. A stability analysis is conducted to show the robustness to channel tampering in the scenario where part of the codeword, corresponding to the value of the edge weights, is corrupted. Exploiting the built-in objective coding, we show how to compensate the conservatism that may emerge because of multiple threats in exchange for higher encryption capabilities. Numerical examples related to semi-autonomous networks are provided.