skip to main content
10.1145/1132516.1132544acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesstocConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

Fast leader-election protocols with bounded cheaters' edge

Published: 21 May 2006 Publication History

Abstract

We study the leader election problem on n players in the asynchronous full-information model. Our main contention is that the most commonly used performance measure for leader-election protocols, called resilience, is unable to discern whether a small number of players can exercise disproportionate influence on the outcome of a protocol, or not. As a remedy we propose a new quantity, named cheaters' edge, which roughly describes by what multiplicative factor malicious players may increase, through cheating, their probability of getting elected. Arguably, a good protocol must have bounded cheaters' edge.We present polynomial-time constructions of new leader-election protocols that are fast, in terms of the rounds required (5, 5 log n, and log n rounds, respectively), but moreover exhibit bounded cheaters' edge under progressively looser restrictions on the number t of malicious players: t < Θn / log n, t < Θn / √log n log log n, and, eventually, no restriction at all---without relying on any a priori knowledge of t. The latter of these three protocols constitutes the first constructive solution to a problem posed by Alon and Naor more than a decade ago.

References

[1]
M. Ajtai and N. Linial. The influence of large coalitions. Combinatorica, 13(2):129--145, 1993.
[2]
N. Alon and M. Naor. Coin-flipping games immune against linear-sized coalitions. SIAM Journal of Computing, 22(2):403--417, 1993. Preliminary version in FOCS 31st, pages 46--54.
[3]
M. Ben-Or and N. Linial. Collective coin flipping. In S. Micali, editor, Randomness and Computation, pages 91--115. Academic Press, New York, 1990. Preliminary version in FOCS 26th, pages 408--416.
[4]
R. Boppana and B. Narayanan. Perfect-information leader election with optimal resilience. SIAM Journal of Computing, 29(4):1304--1320, 2000.
[5]
J. Cooper and N. Linial. Fast perfect-information leader-election protocols with linear immunity. Combinatorica, 15:319--332, 1995. Preliminary version in STOC 25th, pages 662--671.
[6]
U. Feige. Noncryptographic selection protocols. In FOCS 40th, pages 142--152, 1999.
[7]
O. Goldreich, S. Goldwasser, and N. Linial. Fault-tolerant computation in the full information model. SIAM Journal of Computing, 27(2):506--544, 1998. Preliminary version in FOCS 22nd, pages 447--457.
[8]
R. Ostrovsky, S. Rajagopalan, and U. Vazirani. Simple and efficient leader election in the full information model. In STOC 26th, pages 234--242, 1994.
[9]
A. Russell, M. Saks, and D. Zuckerman. Lower bounds for leader election and collective coin-flipping in the perfect information model. SIAM Journal of Computing, 31(6):1645--1662, 2002. Preliminary version in STOC 31st, pages 339--347.
[10]
A. Russell and D. Zuckerman. Perfect information leader election in log* n + O1 rounds. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 63:612--626, 2001. Preliminary version in FOCS 39th, pages 576--583.
[11]
M. Saks. A robust noncryptographic protocol for collective coin-flipping. SIAM Journal of Discrete Mathematics, 2(2):240--244, 1989.
[12]
D. Zuckerman. Randomness-optimal oblivious sampling. Random Structures and Algorithms, 11:345--367, 1997. Preliminary version in STOC 28th, pages 286--295.

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. Fast leader-election protocols with bounded cheaters' edge

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    STOC '06: Proceedings of the thirty-eighth annual ACM symposium on Theory of Computing
    May 2006
    786 pages
    ISBN:1595931341
    DOI:10.1145/1132516
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 21 May 2006

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. coin-flipping
    2. distributed computing
    3. leader election

    Qualifiers

    • Article

    Conference

    STOC06
    Sponsor:
    STOC06: Symposium on Theory of Computing
    May 21 - 23, 2006
    WA, Seattle, USA

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,469 of 4,586 submissions, 32%

    Upcoming Conference

    STOC '25
    57th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2025)
    June 23 - 27, 2025
    Prague , Czech Republic

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)2
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
    Reflects downloads up to 20 Jan 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2019)Distributed Protocols for Leader ElectionACM Transactions on Economics and Computation10.1145/33037127:1(1-26)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2019
    • (2014)Optimal impartial selectionProceedings of the fifteenth ACM conference on Economics and computation10.1145/2600057.2602836(803-820)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2014
    • (2010)Rationality in the full-information modelProceedings of the 7th international conference on Theory of Cryptography10.1007/978-3-642-11799-2_24(401-418)Online publication date: 9-Feb-2010
    • (2008)Strategyproof deterministic lotteries under broadcast communicationProceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 310.5555/1402821.1402922(1549-1552)Online publication date: 12-May-2008
    • (2007)Electing the Doge of VeniceProceedings of the 20th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium10.1109/CSF.2007.21(295-310)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2007
    • (2006)Random selection with an adversarial majorityProceedings of the 26th annual international conference on Advances in Cryptology10.1007/11818175_25(409-426)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2006

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media