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

An Autonomic Cross-Platform Operating Environment for On-Demand Internet Computing

The Internet has evolved into a global and ubiquitous communication medium interconnecting powerful application servers, diverse desktop computers and mobile notebooks. Along with recent developments in computer technology, such as the convergence of computing and communication devices, the way how people use computers and the Internet has changed people´s working habits and has led to new application scenarios. On the one hand, pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing and nomadic computing become more and more important since different computing devices like PDAs and notebooks may be used concurrently and alternately, e.g. while the user is on the move. On the other hand, the ubiquitous availability and pervasive interconnection of computing systems have fostered various trends towards the dynamic utilization and spontaneous collaboration of available remote computing resources, which are addressed by approaches like utility computing, grid computing, cloud computing and public computing. From a general point of view, the common objective of this development is the use of Internet applications on demand, i.e. applications that are not installed in advance by a platform administrator but are dynamically deployed and run as they are requested by the application user. The heterogeneous and unmanaged nature of the Internet represents a major challenge for the on demand use of custom Internet applications across heterogeneous hardware platforms, operating systems and network environments. Promising remedies are autonomic computing systems that are supposed to maintain themselves without particular user or application intervention. In this thesis, an Autonomic Cross-Platform Operating Environment (ACOE) is presented that supports On Demand Internet Computing (ODIC), such as dynamic application composition and ad hoc execution migration. The approach is based on an integration middleware called crossware that does not replace existing middleware but operates as a self-managing mediator between diverse application requirements and heterogeneous platform configurations. A Java implementation of the Crossware Development Kit (XDK) is presented, followed by the description of the On Demand Internet Computing System (ODIX). The feasibility of the approach is shown by the implementation of an Internet Application Workbench, an Internet Application Factory and an Internet Peer Federation. They illustrate the use of ODIX to support local, remote and distributed ODIC, respectively. Finally, the suitability of the approach is discussed with respect to the support of ODIC

Agents mobiles coopérants pour les environnements dynamiques

A partir de l'étude de la mobilité dans les paradigmes de programmation pour les systèmes distribués et des différents architectures réseaux, et principalement celles sans-fils, nous avons pu identifier le problème de la gestion des unités mobiles (PDA, smartphone, ...) lorsque l'on souhaite les intégrer dans Internet. Leurs déplacements introduisent un fort dynamisme matériel qui ne permet plus d'utiliser les techniques classiques d'un internet et d'obtenir un système gérant globalement la localisation de toutes les unités. Cette absence de gestion globale remet en cause les méthodes classiques de conception fondées sur un système offrant une représentation stable de l'environnements. Dans ce contexte, nous avons étudié la conception basée sur les agents mobiles, programmes se déplaçant de site en site de manière autonome, afin de démontrer leur utilité dans des environnements dynamiques à l'échelle d'Internet, et ce, en l'absence d'un système capable de gérer la localisation globale. ABSTRACT : From the study of programming paradigms used in distributed systems and recent network architectures, especially wireless ones, we distinguish the problem of mobile unit management (PDA, smartphone, ...) when they are involved in the Internet. Their mobility introduces a high physical dynamism which leads to reconsider design patterns used in an intranet. Such systems do not allow to provide a global view of the distribution. This absence of global view implies to revisit classical design approaches based upon a system supplying a stable context representation. Therefore, we have studied a design approach based upon mobile agents, namely programs moving from site to site in an autonomous way. We demonstrate their usefulness in such dynamic environments at large scale in the Internet, in which there exits non global location service