A survey of security issue in multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems have attracted the attention of researchers because of agents' automatic, pro-active, and dynamic problem solving behaviors. Consequently, there has been a rapid development in agent technology which has enabled us to provide or receive useful and convenient services in a variety of areas such as banking, transportation, e-business, and healthcare. In many of these services, it is, however, necessary that security is guaranteed. Unless we guarantee the security services based on agent-based systems, these services will face significant deployment problems. In this paper, we survey existing work related to security in multi-agent systems, especially focused on access control and trust/reputation, and then present our analyses. We also present existing problems and discuss future research challenges. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V 2011

Quality of Information in Mobile Crowdsensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm, such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process, since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research challenges, along with possible directions of future work.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN

A Survey on Trust Computation in the Internet of Things

Internet of Things defines a large number of diverse entities and services which interconnect with each other and individually or cooperatively operate depending on context, conditions and environments, produce a huge personal and sensitive data. In this scenario, the satisfaction of privacy, security and trust plays a critical role in the success of the Internet of Things. Trust here can be considered as a key property to establish trustworthy and seamless connectivity among entities and to guarantee secure services and applications. The aim of this study is to provide a survey on various trust computation strategies and identify future trends in the field. We discuss trust computation methods under several aspects and provide comparison of the approaches based on trust features, performance, advantages, weaknesses and limitations of each strategy. Finally the research discuss on the gap of the trust literature and raise some research directions in trust computation in the Internet of Things

Analysing Trust Issues in Cloud Identity Environments

Trust acts as a facilitator for decision making in environments, where decisions are subject to risk and uncertainty. Security is one of the factors contributing to the trust model that is a requirement for service users. In this paper we ask, What can be done to improve end user trust in choosing a cloud identity provider? Security and privacy are central issues in a cloud identity environment and it is the end user who determines the amount of trust they have in any identity system. This paper is an in-depth literature survey that evaluates identity service delivery in a cloud environment from the perspective of the service user

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Security in Mobile Multiagent Systems

This report contains the Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Security on Security of Mobile Multiagent Systems (SEMAS2002). The Workshop was held in Montreal, Canada as a satellite event to the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents in 2001. The far reaching influence of the Internet has resulted in an increased interest in agent technologies, which are poised to play a key role in the implementation of successful Internet and WWW-based applications in the future. While there is still considerable hype concerning agent technologies, there is also an increasing awareness of the problems involved. In particular, that these applications will not be successful unless security issues can be adequately handled. Although there is a large body of work on cryptographic techniques that provide basic building-blocks to solve specific security problems, relatively little work has been done in investigating security in the multiagent system context. Related problems are secure communication between agents, implementation of trust models/authentication procedures or even reflections of agents on security mechanisms. The introduction of mobile software agents significantly increases the risks involved in Internet and WWW-based applications. For example, if we allow agents to enter our hosts or private networks, we must offer the agents a platform so that they can execute correctly but at the same time ensure that they will not have deleterious effects on our hosts or any other agents / processes in our network. If we send out mobile agents, we should also be able to provide guarantees about specific aspects of their behaviour, i.e., we are not only interested in whether the agents carry out-out their intended task correctly. They must defend themselves against attacks initiated by other agents, and survive in potentially malicious environments. Agent technologies can also be used to support network security. For example in the context of intrusion detection, intelligent guardian agents may be used to analyse the behaviour of agents on a firewall or intelligent monitoring agents can be used to analyse the behaviour of agents migrating through a network. Part of the inspiration for such multi-agent systems comes from primitive animal behaviour, such as that of guardian ants protecting their hill or from biological immune systems