Abstract

In many applications that employ wireless sensor networks (WSNs), robustness of distributed inference against Byzantine
attacks is important. In this work, distributed inference is considered when local sensors send M-ary data to the fusion
center. The optimal Byzantine attack policy is then derived under the assumption that the Byzantine adversary has the
knowledge of the statistics of local quantization outputs. Our analysis indicates that the fusion center can be blinded such
that the detection error is as poor as a random guess when an adequate fraction of sensors are compromised.