Authentication of Multi-agent System with Verifiable Computation and Distributed Aggregation

Abstract

We propose an authentication scheme for a multiagent system over integers, based on verifiable computation primitives. The naive approach, employing Freivalds' algorithm in centralized way, faces several challenges. Specifically, unreliability of the network introduces the risk of information tampering by other agents. To this end, it requires locally updating and merging the proofs of the individual states in a distributed manner. Our proposed method addresses these issues with assuming presence of a leader agent who is responsible for validating the correctness of all the states of the agents. This can be achieved by a distributed protocol that aggregates proofs from the individual agents, relying on the well-known knowledge-of-exponent assumption. By using this distributed protocol, computational complexity and communication cost are reduced compared to centralized verification. Furthermore, we incorporate a clustering technique to distribute storage requirements. © 2024 IEEE.