Stealthy attacks on pheromone swarming

In multi-agent systems, digital pheromone swarming algorithms are used to coordinate agents to achieve complex and intelligent behaviors. Studies have shown that pheromone swarming systems are versatile, efficient and resilient to failures, and thus are applicable in various scenarios such as border control, area coverage, target tracking, search and rescue, etc. Due to their reliance on wireless communication channels - which are vulnerable to interference and jamming attacks - it becomes important to study the security of these systems under malicious conditions. In this paper, we investigate the security of pheromone swarming under different types of jamming attacks. In particular, we expose new types of stealthy attacks that aim to maximize the damage inflicted on the swarm while reducing the risk of exposure. Unlike complete Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, the attacks exposed select which signal to interfere with based on the current state of the swarm. We have assessed the impact of the attacks through new metrics that expose the tradeoff between damage and cost. Our results show that the exposed attacks are more potent than traditional DoS-like attacks. Our results are obtained from simulation experiments and real physical implementation using a number of iRobot Create robots in our Mobile Cyber-Physical Systems lab.