Sabotage-proof Messenger Discovery for Protesters based on Brownian motion and Erasure Coding

Sabotage-proof message dissemination is critical for a successful protest. To successfully propagate the messages to the crowd, it is critical to develop a sabotage-proof protocol to discover the messengers for information relay. The protocol should be simple, efficient, and sabotage-proof. In this paper, we review the previous protocols and propose a new protocol that exploits the Brownian-motion of the protesters. The proposed distributed protocol is simple, but it is robust against sabotage. In every message propagation, the sender encodes the message with erasure coding into multiple packets, then the sender broadcasts one packet after another while the protesters are in Brownian-motion. The receivers that do not receive all packets but receive enough packets to decode the original message will be the potential messengers. Mathematical analysis and simulation verified the viability of the proposed protocol.