Resilient Leadership Delegation in Tactical Systems

Abstract

Transferring the role of leadership between members of a team is an important requirement in tactical operations as it allows an operation to continue in spite of unforeseen events. Delegation, at first glance, appears to be the simple act of giving someone else a right that one possesses. However, this basic function is challenging to implement electronically, and thus there is a need for mechanisms to enforce flexible delegation policies in distributed systems. It has been shown that Law Governed Interaction (LGI) can address these challenges based on the assumption of the trustworthiness of its own enforcement infrastructure. However, to meet the needs of tactical missions, the proposed mechanism should also be resilient to the Byzantine compromise of the infrastructure. Therefore, in this paper we extend the original LGI model to provide containment, guaranteeing that a single Byzantine agent cannot compromise the properties of the system and in general, our approach can withstand the presence of multiple Byzantine agents as long as a correlated pair of agents is not corrupt.