Optimal voting strategy against rational attackers

Voting algorithms are often used to improve a system's reliability through fault tolerance. However, when both the reliability of individual voters and the existence of rational attackers are taken into consideration, the number of voters that participate in an actual voting process determines the fault-and-attack tolerance performance of voting algorithms. In this paper, we are to find an optimal voting strategy (i.e., the optimal number of participating voters) against rational attackers whose goal is to defect the system by strategically compromising individual voters across the system. We model the problem of deciding the number of participating voters against rational attackers as a two-person zero-sum game problem and provide solutions based on the results from this well-known game problem. A set of experiments are performed to illustrate the voting strategy's performance in the presences of rational attackers.