Faithful and Privacy-Preserving Implementation of Average Consensus

Abstract

We propose a protocol based on mechanism design theory and encrypted control to solve average consensus problems among rational and strategic agents while preserving their privacy. The proposed protocol provides a mechanism that incentivizes the agents to faithfully implement the intended behavior specified in the protocol. Furthermore, the protocol runs over encrypted data using homomorphic encryption and secret sharing to protect the privacy of agents. We also analyze the security of the proposed protocol using a simulation paradigm in secure multi-party computation. The proposed protocol demonstrates that mechanism design and encrypted control can complement each other to achieve security under rational adversaries.