Gossip Average Consensus in a Byzantine Environment Using Stochastic Set-Valued Observers

Abstract

We address the problem of a consensus system in the presence of Byzantine faults seen as an attacker injecting a perturbation in the state of the nodes. We propose the use of Set-Valued Observers to detect if the state observations are compatible with the system dynamics. The method is extended to the stochastic case by introducing a strategy to construct a set that is guaranteed to contain all possible states with, at least, a pre-specified desired probability. The proposed algorithm is stable in the sense that it requires a finite number of vertices to represent polytopic sets while also enabling the a priori computation of the largest magnitude of a disturbance that an attacker can inject without being detected.