Anonymous Privacy-Preserving Consensus via Mixed Encryption Communication

This brief introduces the concept of anonymous communication into multi-agent systems and proposes a new solution to deal with the trade-off between privacy and accuracy in privacy-preserving consensus. Furthermore, mixed encryption is applied into multi-agent systems for the first time which provides a safe and high-efficient communication. Specifically, asymmetric encryption is used at the beginning of communication to guarantee the secure exchange of initial values and a new symmetric encryption approach, called state difference, is designed and used in the following process to reduce the high cost of computing and communicating in asymmetric encryption. Combining the above methods, anonymous mixed encryption communication protocol for multi-agent systems to reach privacy-preserving consensus is finally proposed. The numerical simulation shows the effectiveness of the proposed communication protocol.