An anti-consensus strategy based on continuous perturbation updates in opposite directions

Abstract

In modern society, multi-agent consensus is applied in many applications such as distributed machine learning, wireless sensor networks and so on. However, some agents might behave abnormally subject to external attack or internal faults, and thus fault-tolerant consensus problem is studied recently, among which Q-consensus is one of the state-of-the-art and effective methods to identify all the faulty agents and achieve consensus for normal agents in general networks. To fight against Q-consensus algorithm, this paper proposes a novel strategy, called split attack, which is simple but capable of breaking consensus convergence. By aggregating all the states of neighboring nodes with an extra perturbation, the normal nodes are split into sub-groups and converge to two separate values, so that consensus is broken. Two scenarios, including the introduction of additional faulty nodes and compromise of the original nodes, are considered. More specifically, in the former case, two additional faulty nodes are adopted, each of which is responsible to mislead parts of the normal nodes. While in the latter one, two original normal nodes are compromised to mislead the whole system. Moreover, the compromised nodes selection is fundamentally a classification problem, and thus optimized through CNN. Finally, the numerical simulations are provided to verify the proposed schemes and indicate that the proposed method outperforms other attack methods.