Skip to main content
Book cover

International Workshop on Dynamic Logic

DaLi 2020: Dynamic Logic. New Trends and Applications pp 51–67Cite as

Dealing with Unreliable Agents in Dynamic Gossip

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNTCS,volume 12569)

Abstract

Gossip describes the spread of information throughout a network of agents. It investigates how agents, each starting with a unique secret, can efficiently make peer-to-peer calls so that ultimately everyone knows all secrets. In Dynamic Gossip, agents share phone numbers in addition to secrets, which allows the network to grow at run-time.

Most gossip protocols assume that all agents are reliable, but this is not given for many practical applications. We drop this assumption and study Dynamic Gossip with unreliable agents. The aim is then for agents to learn all secrets of the reliable agents and to identify the unreliable agents.

We show that with unreliable agents classic results on Dynamic Gossip no longer hold. Specifically, the Learn New Secrets protocol is no longer characterised by the same class of graphs, so-called sun graphs. In addition, we show that unreliable agents that do not initiate communication are harder to identify than agents that do. This has paradoxical consequences for measures against unreliability, for example to combat the spread of fake news in social networks.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-65840-3_4
  • Chapter length: 17 pages
  • Instant PDF download
  • Readable on all devices
  • Own it forever
  • Exclusive offer for individuals only
  • Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout
eBook
USD   64.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • ISBN: 978-3-030-65840-3
  • Instant PDF download
  • Readable on all devices
  • Own it forever
  • Exclusive offer for individuals only
  • Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout
Softcover Book
USD   84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
Learn about institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Allcott, H., Gentzkow, M.: Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. J. Econ. Perspect. 31(2), 211–268 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.31.2.211

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  2. Apt, K.R., Grossi, D., van der Hoek, W.: Epistemic protocols for distributed gossiping. In: Proceedings TARK 2015. EPTCS, vol. 215, pp. 51–66 (2015). https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.215.5

  3. Attamah, M., van Ditmarsch, H., Grossi, D., van der Hoek, W.: Knowledge and gossip. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-first European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 21–26 (2014). https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-419-0-21

  4. Baird, L.: The swirlds hashgraph consensus algorithm: fair, fast, Byzantine fault tolerance (2017). https://www.swirlds.com/downloads/SWIRLDS-TR-2016-01.pdf

  5. van den Berg, L.: Unreliable gossip (2018). https://eprints.illc.uva.nl/1597/, Master’s thesis, University of Amsterdam

  6. Castro, M., Liskov, B.: Practical Byzantine fault tolerance. In: Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI 1999, pp. 173–186 (1999). https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/osdi99/castro.html

  7. van Ditmarsch, H., van Eijck, J., Pardo, P., Ramezanian, R., Schwarzentruber, F.: Dynamic gossip. Bull. Iran. Math. Soc. 45(3), 701–728 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41980-018-0160-4

    CrossRef  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  8. van Ditmarsch, H., Gattinger, M., Kuijer, L.B., Pardo, P.: Strengthening gossip protocols using protocol-dependent knowledge. J. Appl. Logics - IfCoLog J. Logics Appl. 6(1) (2019). https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.12321

  9. Eugster, P.T., Guerraoui, R., Kermarrec, A.M., Massoulié, L.: Epidemic information dissemination in distributed systems. Computer 37, 60–67 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2004.1297243

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  10. Harary, F., Schwenk, A.J.: The communication problem on graphs and digraphs. J. Franklin Inst. 297, 491–495 (1974). https://doi.org/10.1016/0016-0032(74)90126-4

    CrossRef  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  11. Hedetniemi, S.M., Hedetniemi, S.T., Liestman, A.L.: A survey of gossiping and broadcasting in communication networks. Networks 18(4), 319–349 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1002/net.3230180406

    CrossRef  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  12. Hoefler, T., Barak, A., Shiloh, A., Drezner, Z.: Corrected gossip algorithms for fast reliable broadcast on unreliable systems. In: 2017 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), pp. 357–366 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1109/IPDPS.2017.36

  13. Lamport, L., Shostak, R., Pease, M.: The Byzantine generals problem. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. (TOPLAS) 4(3), 382–401 (1982). https://doi.org/10.1145/3335772.3335936

    CrossRef  MATH  Google Scholar 

  14. Shi, G., Johansson, M., Johansson, K.H.: Randomized gossiping with unreliable communication: dependent or independent node updates. In: 2012 IEEE 51st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), pp. 4846–4851 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1109/CDC.2012.6426729

  15. Tijdeman, R.: On a telephone problem. Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde 3(19), 188–192 (1971)

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  16. Wang, H., Liao, X., Wang, Z., Huang, T., Chen, G.: Distributed parameter estimation in unreliable sensor networks via broadcast gossip algorithms. Neural Netw. 73, 1–9 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2015.09.008

    CrossRef  MATH  Google Scholar 

  17. Watts, D.J., Strogatz, S.H.: Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks. Nature 393(6684), 440–442 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/30918

    CrossRef  MATH  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work is based on the master’s thesis of the first author [5], supervised by Jan van Eijck. We thank Hans van Ditmarsch and the anonymous reviewers at the DaLí workshop for helpful feedback.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Univ. Grenoble Alpes, Inria, CNRS, Saint-Martin-d’Hères, France

    Line van den Berg

  2. University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Malvin Gattinger

Authors
  1. Line van den Berg
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Malvin Gattinger
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Line van den Berg .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    Prof. Manuel A. Martins

  2. Institute of Computer Science, Czech Academy of Sciences, Praha 8, Czech Republic

    Dr. Igor Sedlár

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

van den Berg, L., Gattinger, M. (2020). Dealing with Unreliable Agents in Dynamic Gossip. In: Martins, M.A., Sedlár, I. (eds) Dynamic Logic. New Trends and Applications. DaLi 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12569. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65840-3_4

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65840-3_4

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-65839-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-65840-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)