Making evildoers pay
Seth Lewis Gilbert, Maxwell Young · 2012
Consider a time-slotted, single-hop, wireless sensor network consisting of n correct devices and and f•n Byzantine devices where f≥0 is any constant; the Byzantine devices may or may not outnumber the correct ones. There exists a trusted sender Alice who wishes to deliver a message m over a single channel to the correct devices. There is also an evil user Carol who controls the Byzantine devices and uses them to disrupt the communication channel. For a constant k≥2, the correct and Byzantine devices each possess a meager energy budget of O(n1/k), Alice and Carol each possess a limited budget of Õ(n1/k), and sending or listening in a slot incurs unit cost. This setup captures the inherent challenges of guaranteeing communication despite scarce resources and attacks on the network. Given this Alice versus Carol scenario, we ask: Is communication of m feasible and, if so, at what cost?