Brief Announcement: Reliable Message Transmission under Partial Knowledge and General Adversaries

We address the problem of Reliable Message Transmission (RMT), in the general adversary model of Hirt and Maurer [2], which subsumes earlier models such as the global or local threshold adversaries. We employ the recently introduced Partial Knowledge Model [8], which captures any case of initial players’ topology knowledge. Our main contribution is the determination of a necessary and sufficient condition for achieving RMT in the partial knowledge model with a general adversary. We propose the RMT-Partial Knowledge Algorithm (RMT-PKA), which solves RMT whenever this is possible, therefore it is a unique algorithm, as defined in [10]. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first unique protocol for RMT against general adversaries in the partial knowledge model