The Impact of Complex and Informed Adversarial Behavior in Graphical Coordination Games

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How does system-level information impact the ability of an adversary to degrade performance in a networked control system? How does the complexity of an adversary's strategy affect its ability to degrade performance? This article focuses on these questions in the context of graphical coordination games where an adversary can influence a given fraction of the agents in the system, and the agents follow log-linear learning, a well-known distributed learning algorithm. Focusing on a class of homogeneous ring graphs of various connectivity, we begin by demonstrating that minimally connected ring graphs are the most susceptible to adversarial influence. We then proceed to characterize how both the sophistication of the attack strategies (static versus dynamic) and the informational awareness about the network structure can be leveraged by an adversary to degrade system performance. Focusing on the set of adversarial policies that induce stochastically stable states, our findings demonstrate that the relative importance between sophistication and information changes with the influencing power of the adversary. In particular, sophistication far outweighs informational awareness with regards to degrading system-level damage when the adversary's influence power is relatively weak. However, the opposite is true when an adversary's influence power is more substantial.