Agent Agreement Protocols based on Golay Error-Correcting Code

In this paper, we propose simple protocols for enabling two communicating agents that may have never met before to extract common knowledge out of any initial knowledge that each of them possesses. The initial knowledge from which the agents start, may even be independent of each other, implying that the two agents need not have had previous access to common information sources. In addition, the common knowledge extracted upon the termination of the protocols depends, in a fair way, on the (possibly independent) information items initially known, separately, by the two agents. It is fair in the sense that there is a negotiation between the two agents instead of one agent forcing the other to conform to its own knowledge. These protocols, may be extended in order to support security applications where the establishment of a common knowledge is required. Moreover, the implementation of the protocols leads to reasonably small code that can also fit within resource limited devices involved in any communication network while, at the same time, it is efficient as simulation results demonstrate.