Adding security and trust to multiagent systems

Multiagent systems (MASs) are societies whose individuals are software delegatees (agents) acting on behalf of their owners or delegators (people or organizations). When deployed in an open network such as the Internet, MASs face some trust and security issues. Agents come and go, and interact with strangers. Assumptions about security and general trustworthiness of agents and their deployers are inadequate in this context. In this paper, the design of a security infrastructure is presented applicable to MASs in general. This design addresses both security threats and trust issues. In this design, there are mechanisms for ensuring secure communication among agents and secure naming and resource location services. And two types of trusts are addressed: trust that agents will not misbehave and trust that agents are really delegatees of whom they claim to be. To establish the first type of trust, deployers of agents are made liable for the actions of their agents; to establish the second type of trust, it is proposed that agents prove that they know secrets that only their delegators know.