Abstract
Multi-robot networks use wireless communication to provide wide-ranging services such as aerial surveillance and unmanned delivery. However, effective coordination between multiple robots requires trust, making them particularly vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Specifically, such networks can be gravely disrupted by the Sybil attack, where even a single malicious robot can spoof a large number of fake clients. This paper proposes a new solution to defend against the Sybil attack, without requiring expensive cryptographic key-distribution. Our core contribution is a novel algorithm implemented on commercial Wi-Fi radios that can “sense” spoofers using the physics of wireless signals. We derive theoretical guarantees on how this algorithm bounds the impact of the Sybil Attack on a broad class of multi-robot problems, including locational coverage and unmanned delivery. We experimentally validate our claims using a team of AscTec quadrotor servers and iRobot Create ground clients, and demonstrate spoofer detection rates over 96%.
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Notes
The case of adversarial server robots is left for future work although many of the concepts in the current paper are extensible to this case as well.
Detecting if a client i is spoofed becomes easier given more servers communicating with i (i.e., a larger neighborhood \(\mathcal {N}_i\)). But even with a single server, this determination can be made. A theoretical treatment of this point is given in Sect. 5 and experimental results (Sect. 9.1) use as little as one server.
For clarity, we drop dependence on i, l for SNR, \(\sigma _\theta \) and \(\sigma _\phi \).
This is a mild requirement since 25–30 packets can be transmitted in tens of milliseconds, even at the lowest data rate of 6Mb/s of 802.11n Wi-Fi.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by the NSF and MAST project (ARL Grant W911NF-08-2-0004). We thank members of the MIT Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing: Amazon.com, Cisco, Google, Intel, MediaTek, Microsoft, and Telefonica for their interest and general support.
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This is one of several papers published in Autonomous Robots comprising the “Special Issue on Robotics Science and Systems”.
Stephanie Gil and Swarun Kumar: Co-primary authors.
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Gil, S., Kumar, S., Mazumder, M. et al. Guaranteeing spoof-resilient multi-robot networks. Auton Robot 41, 1383–1400 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-017-9621-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-017-9621-5