Maximum Entropy Attack on Decision Fusion With Herding Behaviors

The reliability and security of distributed detection systems have become increasingly important due to their growing prevalence in various applications. As advancements in human-machine systems continue, human factors, such as herding behaviors, are becoming influential in decision fusion process of these systems. The presence of malicious users further highlights the necessity to mitigate security concerns. In this paper, we propose a maximum entropy attack exploring the herding behaviors of users to amplify the hazard of attackers. Different from prior works that try to maximize the fusion error rate, the proposed attack maximizes the entropy of inferred system states from the fusion center, making the fusion results the same as a random coin toss. Moreover, we design static and dynamic attack modes to maximize the entropy of fusion results at the steady state and during the dynamic evolution stage, respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed attack strategy can cause the fusion accuracy to hover around 50% and existing fusion rules cannot resist our proposed attack, demonstrating its effectiveness.