Privacy-Preserving Consensus over a Distributed Network against Eavesdropping Attacks

Abstract

Motivated by the increasing risk of data leaks in distributed networks, we consider the privacy-preserving problem in a consensus network in the presence of an eavesdropper who is able to intercept the data transmitted on the network. First, we introduce a consensus protocol with privacy-preserving function, and analyze its convergence and its privacy-preserving effect. Second, we propose a criterion to measure the degree of network privacy leaks in the existence of the eavesdropper. Particularly, we consider the networks with ring topology and small-world topology, where we find a suboptimal eavesdropping strategy that maximizes the probability of privacy leaks. Finally, we verify all the derived results by numerical examples.