Event-Triggered Resilient Average Consensus with Adversary Detection in the Presence of Byzantine Agents

Peng Zhang, Changqing Hu, Sentang Wu, Ruiyan Gong, Ziming Luo
2021 IEEE Access  
This paper addresses the problem of resilient average consensus in the presence of Byzantine agents in multi-agent networks. An event-triggered secure acceptance and broadcasting algorithm is proposed in which full knowledge of the network and high computational capabilities of each regular node are not required. The computational expense and communication times are also reduced for the event-triggered mechanism. We analyze the conditions for such a fully distributed algorithm to succeed in the
more » ... f-local adversarial model. A new definition called an f-propagation graph, which is extended from r-robustness, turns out to be more accurate in describing the required topology conditions. Based on the proposed algorithm and topology conditions, we provide another algorithm to detect the adversarial nodes according to their abnormal behavior. When the network topology is an f-propagation graph, regular nodes that are equipped with the proposed algorithms update state values synchronously and eventually converge asymptotically to resilient average consensus. Simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms and the network topology conditions. INDEX TERMS Multi-agent networks, resilient consensus, adversary detection, event-triggered, Byzantine agents. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Cong Pu . network, due to limited communication channels, energy, or computational capacity. Another major concern in networked systems is security since large-scale distributed systems have many potential vulnerable points for failures or attacks. Cyberattacks [6] on multi-agent networks can be roughly classified into two types, denial-of-service attacks and deception attacks, depending on the adversary's security goals of the data exchanged through communication networks. Denial-of-service attacks [7] aim to disrupt data availability and exchange ability by maliciously consuming communication or computational resources. Deception attacks [8] intend to compromise data integrity and trustworthiness by manipulating packets over communication networks. To defend against these attacks, one common approach is to increase the barriers to entry in security, such as cryptographic techniques [9] . Another approach is to improve the resilience of the application layer protocols, such as by designing consensus algorithms so that even if a subset of the nodes are compromised, the remaining regular nodes are still VOLUME 9, 2021 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
doi:10.1109/access.2021.3108639 fatcat:rbupfwpqvng67ojieom6aesbve