S-MAS: An adaptive hierarchical distributed multi-agent architecture for blocking malicious SOAP messages within Web Services environments

During the last years the use of Web Service-based applications has notably increased. However, the security has not evolved proportionally, which makes these applications vulnerable and objective of attacks. One of the most common attacks requiring novel solutions is the denial of service attack (DoS), caused for the modifications introduced in the XML of the SOAP messages. The specifications of existing security standards do not focus on this type of attack. This article presents the S-MAS architecture as a novel adaptive approach for dealing with DoS attacks in Web Service environments, which represents an alternative to the existing centralized solutions. S-MAS proposes a distributed hierarchical multi-agent architecture that implements a classification mechanism in two phases. The main benefits of the approach are the distributed capabilities of the multi-agent systems and the self-adaption ability to the changes that occur in the patterns of attack. A prototype of the architecture was developed and the results obtained are presented in this study

A New Prototype for Intelligent Visual Fraud Detection in Agent-Based Auditing Framework

While US. Sarbanes Oxley act has been viewed by most as an onerous and expensive requirement; it is having a positive impact on driving appropriate levels of investment in IT security, controls, and transactional systems. This paper introduces a new secure solution for auditing and accounting based on artificial intelligence technology. These days, security is a big issue among regulatory firms. Big companies are concerned about their data to be disseminated to their competitors; this high risk prevents them to provide full information to the regulatory firms. This solution not only significantly reduces the risk of unauthorized access to the company’s information but also facilitate a framework for controlling the flow of disseminating information in a risk free method. Managing security is performed by a network of mobile agents in a pyramid structure among regulatory organization like securities and exchanges commissions, stock exchanges in top of this pyramid to the companies in the button. Because of security considerations, our strategy is to delegate all fraud detection algorithms to Intelligent Mobile Auditing Agent and web service undertake all inter communicational activity. Web services can follow auditing actives in predefined framework and they can act based on permitted security allowance to auditors. The current solution is designed based on Java-based mobile agents. Such design reaps strong mobility and security benefits. This new prototyped solution could be a framework for strengthening security for future development in this area. An insider trading case study is used to demonstrate and evaluate the approach

A Java-based Mobile Agent Framework for Distributed Network Applications

Recently, a new paradigm has emerged forstructuring and developing distributed network applications inopen distributed and heterogeneous environments. Manyapplication areas, such as electronic commerce, mobilecomputing, network management and information retrieval canbenefit from the application of the Mobile Agent technology. Theexploitation of Mobile Agents offers several peculiar advantages,such as reduction of network latency, asynchronous execution,robust and fault tolerant behavior. Java technology provides aplatform-independent, portable software environment whichmakes it an excellent tool for mobile agent development. MobileAgents are mainly intended to be used for applicationsdistributed over large scale (slow) networks because they allowsaving communication costs by moving computation to the hoston which the target data resides. However, it has not becomepopular due to some problems such as security. In this paper, wepresent a distributed network architecture based on the MobileAgent approach. A network of communicating servers each ofwhich support multiple clients is our goal. We also propose asecurity approach for mobile agents, which protect critical dataof mobile agents from malicious attacks, by using cryptographictechniques. We implement a bank service application to be testedon our mobile agent framework. The results suggest that fornetworks with high latency, Mobile Agents may provideimprovements over more conventional client-server systems

Multi-agent-based DDoS detection on big data systems

The Hadoop framework has become the most deployed platform for processing Big Data. Despite its advantages, Hadoop s infrastructure is still deployed within the secured network perimeter because the framework lacks adequate inherent security mechanisms against various security threats. However, this approach is not sufficient for providing adequate security layer against attacks such as Distributed Denial of Service. Furthermore, current work to secure Hadoop s infrastructure against DDoS attacks is unable to provide a distributed node-level detection mechanism. This thesis presents a software agent-based framework that allows distributed, real-time intelligent monitoring and detection of DDoS attack at Hadoop s node-level. The agent s cognitive system is ingrained with cumulative sum statistical technique to analyse network utilisation and average server load and detect attacks from these measurements. The framework is a multi-agent architecture with transducer agents that interface with each Hadoop node to provide real-time detection mechanism. Moreover, the agents contextualise their beliefs by training themselves with the contextual information of each node and monitor the activities of the node to differentiate between normal and anomalous behaviours. In the experiments, the framework was exposed to TCP SYN and UDP flooding attacks during a legitimate MapReduce job on the Hadoop testbed. The experimental results were evaluated regarding performance metrics such as false-positive ratio, false-negative ratio and response time to attack. The results show that UDP and TCP SYN flooding attacks can be detected and confirmed on multiple nodes in nineteen seconds with 5.56% false-positive ration, 7.70% false-negative ratio and 91.5% success rate of detection. The results represent an improvement compare to the state-of the-ar

Service Level Agreement-based GDPR Compliance and Security assurance in (multi)Cloud-based systems

Compliance with the new European General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) and security assurance are currently two major challenges of Cloud-based systems. GDPR compliance implies both privacy and security mechanisms definition, enforcement and control, including evidence collection. This paper presents a novel DevOps framework aimed at supporting Cloud consumers in designing, deploying and operating (multi)Cloud systems that include the necessary privacy and security controls for ensuring transparency to end-users, third parties in service provision (if any) and law enforcement authorities. The framework relies on the risk-driven specification at design time of privacy and security level objectives in the system Service Level Agreement (SLA) and in their continuous monitoring and enforcement at runtime.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 644429 and No 780351, MUSA project and ENACT project, respectively. We would also like to acknowledge all the members of the MUSA Consortium and ENACT Consortium for their valuable help

A high-level semiotic trust agent scoring model for collaborative virtual organisations

In this paper, we describe how a semiotic ladder, together with a supportive trust agent, can be used to address “soft” trust issues in the context of collaborative Virtual Organisations (VO). The intention is to offer all parties better support for trust (as reputation) management including the reduction of risk and improved reliability of VO e-services. The semiotic ladder is intended to support the VO e-service lifecycle through the articulation of e-trust at various levels of system abstraction, including trust as measurable confidence. At the social level, reputation and reliability measures of e-trust are the relevant dimensions as regards choice of VO partner and are also relevant to the negotiation of service level agreements between the VO partners. By contrast, at the lower levels of the trust ladder, e-trust measures typically address the degree to which secure sign on and message level security conforms to various tangible technological security protocols. The novel trust agent provides the e-service consumer with an objective measure of the trustworthiness of the e-service at run-time, just prior to its actual consumption. Specifically, VO e-service consumer confidence level is informed, by leveraging third party objective evidence. This evidence comprises a set of Corporate Governance (CG) scores. These scores are used as a trust proxy for the "real" owner of the VO. There are also inherent limitations associated with the use of CG scores. These are duly acknowledged

Management system requirements for wireless systems beyond 3G

This paper presents a comprehensive description of various management system requirements for systems beyond 3G, which have been identified as a result of the Software Based Systems activities within the Mobile VCE Core 2 program. Specific requirements for systems beyond 3G are discussed and potential technologies to address them proposed. The analysis has been carried out from network, service and security viewpoints

Towards trusted volunteer grid environments

Intensive experiences show and confirm that grid environments can be considered as the most promising way to solve several kinds of problems relating either to cooperative work especially where involved collaborators are dispersed geographically or to some very greedy applications which require enough power of computing or/and storage. Such environments can be classified into two categories; first, dedicated grids where the federated computers are solely devoted to a specific work through its end. Second, Volunteer grids where federated computers are not completely devoted to a specific work but instead they can be randomly and intermittently used, at the same time, for any other purpose or they can be connected or disconnected at will by their owners without any prior notification. Each category of grids includes surely several advantages and disadvantages; nevertheless, we think that volunteer grids are very promising and more convenient especially to build a general multipurpose distributed scalable environment. Unfortunately, the big challenge of such environments is, however, security and trust. Indeed, owing to the fact that every federated computer in such an environment can randomly be used at the same time by several users or can be disconnected suddenly, several security problems will automatically arise. In this paper, we propose a novel solution based on identity federation, agent technology and the dynamic enforcement of access control policies that lead to the design and implementation of trusted volunteer grid environments.Comment: 9 Pages, IJCNC Journal 201