Individual Security and Network Design with Malicious Nodes

Networks are beneficial to those being connected but can also be used as carriers of contagious hostile attacks. These attacks are often facilitated by exploiting corrupt network users. To protect against the attacks, users can resort to costly defense. The decentralized nature of such protection is...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tomasz Janus, Mateusz Skomra, Marcin Dziubiński
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2018-08-01
Series:Information
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/9/9/214
Description
Summary:Networks are beneficial to those being connected but can also be used as carriers of contagious hostile attacks. These attacks are often facilitated by exploiting corrupt network users. To protect against the attacks, users can resort to costly defense. The decentralized nature of such protection is known to be inefficient, but the inefficiencies can be mitigated by a careful network design. Is network design still effective when not all users can be trusted? We propose a model of network design and defense with byzantine nodes to address this question. We study the optimal defended networks in the case of centralized defense and, for the case of decentralized defense, we show that the inefficiencies due to decentralization can be mitigated arbitrarily well when the number of nodes in the network is sufficiently large, despite the presence of the byzantine nodes.
ISSN:2078-2489