Protection against strategic RCS reporting by adversarial peers

Develop a defense against strategic or adversarial reporting of Runtime Criticality Scores by peers in the open, decentralized coordination protocol.

Background

The coordination protocol allows independently owned agents to publish their Runtime Criticality Scores over a peer-to-peer discovery channel and currently trusts each agent to report its score honestly. The paper explicitly leaves unresolved the problem of detecting or resisting strategic reporting and adversarial peers, which could undermine priority ordering, migration, and coordinator fail-over decisions.

References

Two limitations remain open. The disturbance taxonomy and weight templates are fixed at deployment; online updates would extend adaptation without changing the interface. Also, the protocol trusts each peer to report its RCS honestly; defending against strategic reporting and adversarial peers is hard.

— Infrastructure-Aware Runtime Protection of Co-Deployed AI Services at the Industrial Edge  (2610.18313 - Sathyavageeswaran et al., 13 Oct 2026) in Discussion and Conclusion