  Optimum decision fusion in the presence of malicious nodes - often referred
to as Byzantines - is hindered by the necessity of exactly knowing the
statistical behavior of Byzantines. By focusing on a simple, yet widely
studied, set-up in which a Fusion Center (FC) is asked to make a binary
decision about a sequence of system states by relying on the possibly corrupted
decisions provided by local nodes, we propose a game-theoretic framework which
permits to exploit the superior performance provided by optimum decision
fusion, while limiting the amount of a-priori knowledge required. We first
derive the optimum decision strategy by assuming that the statistical behavior
of the Byzantines is known. Then we relax such an assumption by casting the
problem into a game-theoretic framework in which the FC tries to guess the
behavior of the Byzantines, which, in turn, must fix their corruption strategy
without knowing the guess made by the FC. We use numerical simulations to
derive the equilibrium of the game, thus identifying the optimum behavior for
both the FC and the Byzantines, and to evaluate the achievable performance at
the equilibrium. We analyze several different setups, showing that in all cases
the proposed solution permits to improve the accuracy of data fusion. We also
show that, in some instances, it is preferable for the Byzantines to minimize
the mutual information between the status of the observed system and the
reports submitted to the FC, rather than always flipping the decision made by
the local nodes as it is customarily assumed in previous works.
