Understanding the influence of adversaries in distributed systems

Transitioning from a centralized to a distributed decision-making strategy can create vulnerability to adversarial manipulation. We study the potential for adversarial manipulation in a class of graphical coordination games where the adversary can pose as a friendly agent in the game, thereby directly influencing the decision-making rules of a subset of agents. The adversary´s influence can cascade throughout the system, indirectly influencing other agents´ behavior and significantly impacting the emergent collective behavior. The main results in this paper focus on characterizing conditions by which the adversary´s local influence can dramatically impact the emergent global behavior, e.g., destabilize efficient equilibria.