  Average consensus is fundamental for distributed systems since it underpins
key functionalities of such systems ranging from distributed information
fusion, decision-making, to decentralized control. In order to reach an
agreement, existing average consensus algorithms require each agent to exchange
explicit state information with its neighbors. This leads to the disclosure of
private state information, which is undesirable in cases where privacy is of
concern. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that enables secure and
privacy-preserving average consensus in a decentralized architecture in the
absence of any trusted third-parties. By leveraging homomorphic cryptography,
our approach can guarantee consensus to the exact value in a deterministic
manner. The proposed approach is light-weight in computation and communication,
and applicable to time-varying interaction topology cases. A hardware
implementation is presented to demonstrate the capability of our approach.
