Ensuring System-Level Protection against Eavesdropping Adversaries in Distributed Dynamical Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates vulnerabilities in distributed dynamical systems to eavesdropping and reveals that communicating innovation signals, rather than states, offers a fundamental protection mechanism against adversaries.

Contribution

It demonstrates a novel fundamental protection property in distributed systems when using innovation signals instead of state communication.

Findings

State-of-the-art algorithms are vulnerable to eavesdropping.

Innovation signals provide inherent protection against adversaries.

Communicating innovation signals enhances system security without extra layers.

Abstract

In this work, we address the objective of protecting the states of a distributed dynamical system from eavesdropping adversaries. We prove that state-of-the-art distributed algorithms, which rely on communicating the agents' states, are vulnerable in that the final states can be perfectly estimated by any adversary including those with arbitrarily small eavesdropping success probability. While existing literature typically adds an extra layer of protection, such as encryption or differential privacy techniques, we demonstrate the emergence of a fundamental protection quotient in distributed systems when innovation signals are communicated instead of the agents' states.