Security in Pervasive Applications: A Survey

We survey some critical issues arising in pervasive applications, in particular the interplay between context-awareness and security. We shall outline the techniques adapted for guaranteeing applications to securely behave in the digital environment they are part of

Strategic Executions of Choreographed Timed Normative Multi-Agent Systems

This paper proposes a combined mechanism for coordinating agents in timed normative multi-agent systems. Timing constraints in a multi-agent system make it possible to force action execution to happen before certain time invariants are violated. In such multiagent systems we achieve coordination at two orthogonal levels with respect to states and actions. On the one hand, the behaviour of individual agents is regulated by means of social and organisational inspired concepts like norms and sanctions. On the other hand, the behaviour of sets of agents is restricted according to action-based coordination mechanisms called choreographies. In both cases, the resulting behaviour is constrained by time

The Complexity of angel-daemons and game isomorphism

The analysis of the computational aspects of strategic situations is a basic field in Computer Sciences. Two main topics related to strategic games have been developed. First, introduction and analysis of a class of games (so called angel/daemon games) designed to asses web applications, have been considered. Second, the problem of isomorphism between strategic games has been analysed. Both parts have been separately considered. Angel-Daemon Games A service is a computational method that is made available for general use through a wide area network. The performance of web-services may fluctuate; at times of stress the performance of some services may be degraded (in extreme cases, to the point of failure). In this thesis uncertainty profiles and Angel-Daemon games are used to analyse servicebased behaviours in situations where probabilistic reasoning may not be appropriate. In such a game, an angel player acts on a bounded number of ¿angelic¿ services in a beneficial way while a daemon player acts on a bounded number of ¿daemonic¿ services in a negative way. Examples are used to illustrate how game theory can be used to analyse service-based scenarios in a realistic way that lies between over-optimism and over-pessimism. The resilience of an orchestration to service failure has been analysed - here angels and daemons are used to model services which can fail when placed under stress. The Nash equilibria of a corresponding Angel-Daemon game may be used to assign a ¿robustness¿ value to an orchestration. Finally, the complexity of equilibria problems for Angel-Daemon games has been analysed. It turns out that Angel-Daemon games are, at the best of our knowledge, the first natural example of zero-sum succinct games. The fact that deciding the existence of a pure Nash equilibrium or a dominant strategy for a given player is Sp 2-complete has been proven. Furthermore, computing the value of an Angel-Daemon game is EXP-complete. Thus, matching the already known complexity results of the corresponding problems for the generic families of succinctly represented games with exponential number of actions. Game Isomorphism The question of whether two multi-player strategic games are equivalent and the computational complexity of deciding such a property has been addressed. Three notions of isomorphisms, strong, weak and local have been considered. Each one of these isomorphisms preserves a different structure of the game. Strong isomorphism is defined to preserve the utility functions and Nash equilibria. Weak isomorphism preserves only the player preference relations and thus pure Nash equilibria. Local isomorphism preserves preferences defined only on ¿close¿ neighbourhood of strategy profiles. The problem of the computational complexity of game isomorphism, which depends on the level of succinctness of the description of the input games but it is independent of the isomorphism to consider, has been shown. Utilities in games can be given succinctly by Turing machines, boolean circuits or boolean formulas, or explicitly by tables. Actions can be given also explicitly or succinctly. When the games are given in general form, an explicit description of actions and a succinct description of utilities have been assumed. It is has been established that the game isomorphism problem for general form games is equivalent to the circuit isomorphism when utilities are described by Turing Machines; and to the boolean formula isomorphism problem when utilities are described by formulas. When the game is given in explicit form, it is has been proven that the game isomorphism problem is equivalent to the graph isomorphism problem. Finally, an equivalence classes of small games and their graphical representation have been also examined.Postprint (published version

An executable Theory of Multi-Agent Systems Refinement

Complex applications such as incident management, social simulations, manufacturing applications, electronic auctions, e-institutions, and business to business applications are pervasive and important nowadays. Agent-oriented methodology is an advance in abstractionwhich can be used by software developers to naturally model and develop systems for suchapplications. In general, with respect to design methodologies, what it may be important tostress is that control structures should be added at later stages of design, in a natural top-downmanner going from specifications to implementations, by refinement. Too much detail (be itfor the sake of efficiency) in specifications often turns out to be harmful. To paraphrase D.E.Knuth, “Premature optimization is the root of all evil” (quoted in ‘The Unix ProgrammingEnvironment’ by Kernighan and Pine, p. 91).The aim of this thesis is to adapt formal techniques to the agent-oriented methodologyinto an executable theory of refinement. The justification for doing so is to provide correctagent-based software by design. The underlying logical framework of the theory we proposeis based on rewriting logic, thus the theory is executable in the same sense as rewriting logicis. The storyline is as follows. We first motivate and explain constituting elements of agentlanguages chosen to represent both abstract and concrete levels of design. We then proposea definition of refinement between agents written in such languages. This notion of refinement ensures that concrete agents are correct with respect to the abstract ones. The advantageof the definition is that it easily leads to formulating a proof technique for refinement viathe classical notion of simulation. This makes it possible to effectively verify refinement bymodel-checking. Additionally, we propose a weakest precondition calculus as a deductivemethod based on assertions which allow to prove correctness of infinite state agents. Wegeneralise the refinement relation from single agents to multi-agent systems in order to ensure that concrete multi-agent systems refine their abstractions. We see multi-agent systemsas collections of coordinated agents, and we consider coordination artefacts as being basedeither on actions or on normative rules. We integrate these two orthogonal coordinationmechanisms within the same refinement theory extended to a timed framework. Finally, wediscuss implementation aspects.LEI Universiteit LeidenFoundations of Software Technolog