Secure Asynchronous Search

Distributed Constraint Satisfaction (DisCSP) is a general framework for modeling distributed combinatorial problems. Practical distributed problems can involve competitional situations among agents. In such cases not all agents are needed for building a final solution and agents may try to hamper their competitors from reaching a solution. This peculiarity cannot be modeled by current DisCSP formalisms. In particular, there is no mechanism for thwarting agents from disseminating fake nogoods in order to impede their competitors from proposing or reaching a good solution. In this paper we extend a DisCSP framework in order to model competition. We adapt one of the most recent search algorithms to offer agents means to check that received messages are legal.