Secure Consensus via Objective Coding: Robustness Analysis to Channel Tampering

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.