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

Possible attacks on and countermeasures for secure multi-agent computation

In this paper we improve the model for secure multi-agent computation proposed by Endsuleit and Mie. We apply a recent protocol from Hirt and Maurer for secure multi-party computation to build Alliances of n agents that solve a common task. The protocol used is very efficient with a communication load of O(n^2 m) (where m is the number of multiplications). All computations within the Alliance are robust as less than n/3 agents are corrupted at the same time

Privacy in Mobile Agent Systems: Untraceability

Agent based Internet environments are an interesting alternative to existing approaches of building software systems. The enabling feature of agents is that they allow software development based on the abstraction (a "metaphor") of elements of the real world. In other words, they allow building software systems, which work as human societies, in which members share products and services, cooperate or compete with each other. Organisational, behavioural and functional models etc applied into the systems can be copied from the real world. The growing interest in agent technologies in the European Union was expressed through the foundation of the Coordination Action for Agent-Based Computing, funded under the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). The action, called AgentLink III is run by the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme. The long-term goal of AgentLink is to put Europe at the leading edge of international competitiveness in this increasingly important area. According to AgentLink "Roadmap for Agent Based Computing"; agent-based systems are perceived as "one of the most vibrant and important areas of research and development to have emerged in information technology in recent years, underpinning many aspects of broader information society technologies"; However, with the emergence of the new paradigm, came also new challenges. One of them is that agent environments, especially those which allow for mobility of agents, are much more difficult to protect from intruders than conventional systems. Agent environments still lack sufficient and effective solutions to assure their security. The problem which till now has not been addressed sufficiently in agent-based systems is privacy, and particularly the anonymity of agent users. Although anonymity was studied extensively for traditional message-based communication for which during the past twenty five years various techniques have been proposed, for agent systems this problem has never been directly addressed. The research presented in this report aimed at filling this gap. This report summarises results of studies aiming at the identification of threats to privacy in agent-based systems and the methods of their protection.JRC.G.6-Sensors, radar technologies and cybersecurit

MOBILE AGENT SECURITY THROUGH MULTI-AGENT CRYPTOGRAPHIC PROTOCOLS

An increasingly promising and widespread topic of research in distributed computing is the mobile agent paradigm: code travelling and performing computations on remote hosts in an au-tonomous manner. One of the biggest challenges faced by this new paradigm is security. The issue of protecting sensitive code and data carried by a mobile agent against tampering from a malicious host is particularly hard but important. Based on secure multi-party computation, a re-cent research direction shows the feasibility of a software-only solution to this problem, which had been deemed impossible by some researchers previously. The best result prior to this dissertation is a single-agent protocol which requires the participation of a trusted third party. Our research employs multi-agent protocols to eliminate the trusted third party, resulting in a protocol with minimum trust assumptions. This dissertation presents one of the first formal definitions of secure mobile agent computation, in which the privacy and integrity of the agent code and data as well as the data provided by the host are all protected. We present secure protocols for mobile agent computation against static, semi-honest or malicious adversaries without relying on any third party or trusting any specific participant in the system. The security of our protocols is formally proven through standard proo

Mobile Agent Security Through Multi-Agent Cryptographic Protocols +

We consider the problem of keeping sensitive data and algorithms contained in a mobile agent from discovery and exploitation by a malicious host. The focus in this paper is on rigorous techniques based on cryptographic protocols. Algesheimer, Cachin, Camenisch, and Karjoth (IEEE Security and Privacy, 2001) devised a secure agent protocol in such a setting, where agents and hosts are mutually distrusting, but access to a "trusted third party" is available to all participants. In this paper, we present ways of removing the trusted third party, and achieving similar results through the application of multiple agents. As an agent on a remote host is trusted by neither the current host nor the agent originator, the remote agent cannot simply act as a "stand-in" for the trusted third party, and requires the design of non-trivial multi-agent protocols. In addition, our multi-agent protocol can proceed if any subset of the agents of a certain size is available at any particular time, adding faulttolerance which did not exist in previous protocols, while achieving a high level of security. Our solution relies on well-tested cryptographic primitives, including threshold cryptography and oblivious transfer

Exploring Trusted Platform Module Capabilities: A Theoretical and Experimental Study

Trusted platform modules (TPMs) are hardware modules that are bound to a computer's motherboard, that are being included in many desktops and laptops. Augmenting computers with these hardware modules adds powerful functionality in distributed settings, allowing us to reason about the security of these systems in new ways. In this dissertation, I study the functionality of TPMs from a theoretical as well as an experimental perspective. On the theoretical front, I leverage various features of TPMs to construct applications like random oracles that are impossible to implement in a standard model of computation. Apart from random oracles, I construct a new cryptographic primitive which is basically a non-interactive form of the standard cryptographic primitive of oblivious transfer. I apply this new primitive to secure mobile agent computations, where interaction between various entities is typically required to ensure security. I prove these constructions are secure using standard cryptographic techniques and assumptions. To test the practicability of these constructions and their applications, I performed an experimental study, both on an actual TPM and a software TPM simulator which has been enhanced to make it reflect timings from a real TPM. This allowed me to benchmark the performance of the applications and test the feasibility of the proposed extensions to standard TPMs. My tests also show that these constructions are practical

A framework for the protection of mobile agents against malicious hosts

The mobility attribute of a mobile agent implies deployment thereof in untrustworthy environments, which introduces malicious host threats. The research question deals with how a security framework could be constructed to address the mentioned threats without introducing high costs or restraining the mobile agent's autonomy or performance. Available literature have been studied, analysed and discussed. The salient characteristics as well as the drawbacks of current solutions were isolated. Through this knowledge a dynamic mobile agent security framework was defined. The framework is based on the definition of multiple security levels, depending on type of deployment environment and type of application. A prototype was constructed and tested and it was found to be lightweight and efficient, giving developers insight into possible security threats as well as tools for maximum protection against malicious hosts. The framework outperformed other frameworks / models as it provides dynamic solutions without burdening a system with unnecessary security gadgets and hence paying for it in system cost and performanceComputingD.Phil