Multiagent communication security in adversarial settings

Abstract

In many exciting multiagent applications - including future battlefields, law enforcement, and commerce - agents must communicate in inherently or potentially hostile environments in which an adversaries disrupt or intercept the communication between agents for malicious purposes, but the wireless ad hoc networks often proposed for these applications are particularly susceptible to attack. Intelligent agents must balance network performance with possible harm suffered from an adversary's attack, while accounting for the broadcast nature of their communication and heterogenous vulnerabilities of communication links. Furthermore, they must do so when the adversary is also actively and rationally attempting to counter their efforts. We address this challenge in this paper by representing the problem as a game between a sender agent choosing communication paths through a network and an adversary choosing nodes and links to attack. We introduce a network-flow-based approach for compactly representing the competing objectives of network performance and security from adversary attack, and provide a polynomial-time algorithm for finding the equilibrium strategy for the sender. Through empirical evaluation we show how this technique improves upon existing approaches. © 2011 IEEE.