Broadcast in radio networks tolerating byzantine adversarial behavior

• Authors: Chiu-Yuen Koo
• Venue: Proceedings of the twenty-third annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
• Year: 2004

Much work has focused on the Byzantine Generals (or secure broadcast) problem in the standard model in which pairwise communication is available between all parties in the network. Some research has also explored the problem when pairwise channels exist only between selected pairs of players, or under the assumption of "k-cast channels" shared by all subsets of players of size k. However, none of these models are appropriate for radio networks in which a player can communicate only by multicasting a message which is then received by all players within some radius r (i.e., the neighbors of the transmitting node). Yet, as far as we are aware, obtaining secure broadcast in radio networks in the presence of a Byzantine adversary has not been studied before.This paper corrects this omission, and provides the first analysis of secure broadcast in radio networks for the case of Byzantine adversaries. We note that secure broadcast is impossible in the presence of an omnipotent adversary. To bypass this barrier, we make the following assumption: there exists a prefixed schedule for players to communicate and everyone (including corrupted ones) adheres to this schedule. Under this assumption, we give a simple broadcast protocol which is provably secure whenever the adversary corrupts at most 14 r(r+√rover2 + 1)-3 neighbors (roughly a 1/4π fraction) of any honest player. On the other hand, we show that it is impossible to achieve secure broadcast when the adversary corrupts ⌈1/2 r(2r+1)⌉ (roughly a 1/π fraction) neighbors of any honest player.