Game of Coding: Beyond Honest-Majority Assumptions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Nodehi, Hanzaleh Akbari, Cadambe, Viveck R., Maddah-Ali, Mohammad Ali
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Nodehi, Hanzaleh Akbari
Cadambe, Viveck R.
Maddah-Ali, Mohammad Ali
author_facet Nodehi, Hanzaleh Akbari
Cadambe, Viveck R.
Maddah-Ali, Mohammad Ali
contents Coding theory revolves around the incorporation of redundancy into transmitted symbols, computation tasks, and stored data to guard against adversarial manipulation. However, error correction in coding theory is contingent upon a strict trust assumption. In the context of computation and storage, it is required that honest nodes outnumber adversarial ones by a certain margin. However, in several emerging real-world cases, particularly, in decentralized blockchain-oriented applications, such assumptions are often unrealistic. Consequently, despite the important role of coding in addressing significant challenges within decentralized systems, its applications become constrained. Still, in decentralized platforms, a distinctive characteristic emerges, offering new avenues for secure coding beyond the constraints of conventional methods. In these scenarios, the adversary benefits when the legitimate decoder recovers the data, and preferably with a high estimation error. This incentive motivates them to act rationally, trying to maximize their gains. In this paper, we propose a game theoretic formulation for coding, called the game of coding, that captures this unique dynamic where each of the adversaries and the data collector (decoder) have respective utility functions to optimize. The utility functions reflect the fact that both the data collector and the adversary are interested in increasing the chance of data being recoverable by the data collector. Moreover, the utility functions express the interest of the data collector to estimate the input with lower estimation error, but the opposite interest of the adversary. As a first, still highly non-trivial step, we characterize the equilibrium of the game for the repetition code with a repetition factor of 2 for a wide class of utility functions with minimal assumptions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_16643
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Game of Coding: Beyond Honest-Majority Assumptions
Nodehi, Hanzaleh Akbari
Cadambe, Viveck R.
Maddah-Ali, Mohammad Ali
Information Theory
Coding theory revolves around the incorporation of redundancy into transmitted symbols, computation tasks, and stored data to guard against adversarial manipulation. However, error correction in coding theory is contingent upon a strict trust assumption. In the context of computation and storage, it is required that honest nodes outnumber adversarial ones by a certain margin. However, in several emerging real-world cases, particularly, in decentralized blockchain-oriented applications, such assumptions are often unrealistic. Consequently, despite the important role of coding in addressing significant challenges within decentralized systems, its applications become constrained. Still, in decentralized platforms, a distinctive characteristic emerges, offering new avenues for secure coding beyond the constraints of conventional methods. In these scenarios, the adversary benefits when the legitimate decoder recovers the data, and preferably with a high estimation error. This incentive motivates them to act rationally, trying to maximize their gains. In this paper, we propose a game theoretic formulation for coding, called the game of coding, that captures this unique dynamic where each of the adversaries and the data collector (decoder) have respective utility functions to optimize. The utility functions reflect the fact that both the data collector and the adversary are interested in increasing the chance of data being recoverable by the data collector. Moreover, the utility functions express the interest of the data collector to estimate the input with lower estimation error, but the opposite interest of the adversary. As a first, still highly non-trivial step, we characterize the equilibrium of the game for the repetition code with a repetition factor of 2 for a wide class of utility functions with minimal assumptions.
title Game of Coding: Beyond Honest-Majority Assumptions
topic Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.16643