Strategies of Mobile Agents on Malicious Clouds

Cloud computing is a service model enabling resources limited mobile devices to remotely execute tasks on the clouds. The Mobile Agent is a software program on behalf of the software installed in the mobile device to negotiate with other mobile agents in the clouds, which provides a diversity of automated negotiation based applications in Mobile Commences. However, the negotiation plans carried by mobile agents are easily be eavesdropped by the malicious cloud platforms, since the codes of mobile agents are read and executed on the cloud platform. Thus, the sellers can take cheat actions to increase their profits, which is to tailor the negotiation plans to seize buyers’ profits after eavesdropping on buyers’ negotiation plans. In this paper, we consider the buyers can take actions to resist the sellers’ cheatings, that is the buyers can tailor their plans with extremely low demands before migrate to the cloud platform. Above situations are modeled as a mathematical model, called the Eavesdropping and Resistance of Negotiation (ERN) Game. We develop a simulator to simulate an artificial market for analyzing the behaviors on ERN Game. The simulation results show buyers’ resistances deter sellers from cheating and cooperative strategies are adopted by buyers and sellers

A New Distributed Intrusion Detection System Based on Multi-Agent System for Cloud Environment

Cloud computing, like any distributed computing system, is continually exposed to many threats and attacks of various origins. Thus, cloud security is now a very important concern for both providers and users. Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are used to detect attacks in this environment. The goal of security administrators (for both customers and providers) is to prevent and detect attacks while avoiding disruption of the smooth operation of the cloud. Making IDSs efficient is not an easy task in a distributed environment such as the cloud. This problem remains open, and to our knowledge, there are no satisfactory solutions for the automated evaluation and analysis of cloud security. The features of the multi-agent system paradigm, such as adaptability, collaboration, and distribution, make it possible to handle this evolution of cloud computing in an efficient and controlled manner. As a result, multi-agent systems are well suited to the effective management of cloud security. In this paper, we propose an efficient, reliable and secure distributed IDS (DIDS) based on a multi-agent approach to identify and prevent new and complex malicious attacks in this environment. Moreover, some experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of our model

Towards an effective recognition graphical password mechanism based on cultural familiarity

Text-based passwords for authentication are exposed to the dictionary attack as users tend to create weak passwords for easy memorability. When dealing with user’s authentication, pictures are more likely to be simply remembered in comparison with words. Hence, this study aimed to determine the types of pictures in accordance to users’ cultural background. It also investigated the relationship between the choices of password and the cultural familiarity along with the effect of Graphical Password (GP) on security and usability. A list of guidelines was proposed for the recognition of graphical passwords. This is believed to increase the security as well as usability. A total of 40 students were recruited to build a GP database. Further, an evaluation was conducted to investigate users’ familiarity and recognition of the GP from the database using 30 other respondents. The results showed that the 30 participants positively responded to the familiar pictures in accordance to their cultures. The result of successful login rate was 79.51% which indicates that cultural-based GP has increased the respondents’ familiarity by promoting their memorability. Further, the respondents who chose familiar GP had higher guessing attack rate than the unfamiliar GP. Finally, a total of 8 guidelines were established based on the aspects that correspond to the users’ preferences for choosing and processing GP. These guidelines can be used by graphical password system designers to develop effective GP system

Integrating Agents into a Collaborative Knowledge-based System for Business Rules Consistency Management

Capitalization and reuse of expert knowledge are very important for the survival of an enterprise. This paper presents a collaborative approach that utilizes domain ontology and agents. Thanks to our knowledge formalizing process, we give to domain expert an opportunity to store different forms of retrieved knowledge from experiences, design rules, business rules, decision processes, etc. The ontology is built to support business rules management. The global architecture is mainly composed of agents such as Expert agent, Evaluator agent, Translator agent, Security agent and Supervisor agent. The Evaluator agent is at the heart of our functional architecture, its role is to detect the problems that may arise in the consistency management module and provides a solution to these problems in order to validate the accuracy of business rules. In addition, a Security agent is defined to handle both security aspects in rules modeling and multi-agent system. The proposed approach is different from the others in terms of the number of rule’s inconsistencies which are detected and treated like contradiction, redundancy, invalid rules, domain violation and rules never applicable, the collaboration that is initiated among business experts and the guarantee of security of the business rules and all the agents which constitute our system. The developed collaborative system is applied in an industrial case study.

BROSMAP: A Novel Broadcast Based Secure Mobile Agent Protocol for Distributed Service Applications

Mobile agents are smart programs that migrate from one platform to another to perform the user task. Mobile agents offer flexibility and performance enhancements to systems and service real-time applications. However, security in mobile agent systems is a great concern. In this paper, we propose a novel Broadcast based Secure Mobile Agent Protocol (BROSMAP) for distributed service applications that provides mutual authentication, authorization, accountability, nonrepudiation, integrity, and confidentiality. The proposed system also provides protection from man in the middle, replay, repudiation, and modification attacks. We proved the efficiency of the proposed protocol through formal verification with Scyther verification tool

A threshold-based controller for multiagent systems

Monitoring and regulating the deployment of mobile agents to a network based on its available bandwidth is crucial to forestall the possibility of congestion and consequent network degradation. Our study has shown that only one experimental modelhas addressed the issue. Investigation into this model revealed its failure to honour some basic parameters necessary to yield efficient result. These parameters and network bandwidth determine the maximum deployable number of agents to a network. To achieve the set objective, a threshold-based controller is proposed to regulate the injection of mobile agents into the network relative to the available bandwidth, agent size and router traffic size. The result obtained shows that the proposed model is more accurate and reliable than the existing one

A comprehensive approach to MPSoC security: achieving network-on-chip security : a hierarchical, multi-agent approach

Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs) are pervading our lives, acquiring ever increasing relevance in a large number of applications, including even safety-critical ones. MPSoCs, are becoming increasingly complex and heterogeneous; the Networks on Chip (NoC paradigm has been introduced to support scalable on-chip communication, and (in some cases) even with reconfigurability support. The increased complexity as well as the networking approach in turn make security aspects more critical. In this work we propose and implement a hierarchical multi-agent approach providing solutions to secure NoC based MPSoCs at different levels of design. We develop a flexible, scalable and modular structure that integrates protection of different elements in the MPSoC (e.g. memory, processors) from different attack scenarios. Rather than focusing on protection strategies specifically devised for an individual attack or a particular core, this work aims at providing a comprehensive, system-level protection strategy: this constitutes its main methodological contribution. We prove feasibility of the concepts via prototype realization in FPGA technology