SAFE: Secure-Roaming Agents for E-commerce

The development of the Internet has made a powerful impact on the concept of commerce. E-commerce, a new way to conduct business, is gaining more and more popularity. Despite its rapid growth, there are limitations that hinder the expansion of e-commerce. The primary concern for most people when talking about on-line shopping is security. Due to the open nature of the Internet, personal financial details necessary for on-line shopping can be stolen if sufficient security mechanism is not put in place. How to provide the necessary assurance of security to consumers remains a question mark despite various past efforts. Another concern is the lack of intelligence. The Internet is an ocean of information depository. It is rich in content but lacks the necessary intelligent tools to help one locate the correct piece of information. Intelligent agent, a piece of software that can act on behalf of its owner intelligently, is designed to fill this gap. However, no matter how intelligent an agent is, if it remains on its owner’s machine and does not have any roaming capability, its functionality is limited. With the roaming capability, more security concerns arise. In response to these concerns, SAFE, Secure roaming Agent For E-commerce, is designed to provide secure roaming capability to intelligent agents

A behavioral model of simultaneous borrowing and saving

Why do individuals borrow and save money at the same time? I present a model in which sophisticated time-inconsistent agents, when faced with a future investment opportunity, rationally choose to save their wealth and then borrow to fund the investment. The combination of savings and a loan generates incentives for future selves to invest optimally by punishing over-consumption. This paper contains two main results. First, I show that agents who simultaneously save and borrow can have higher lifetime welfare than those who don’t. Second, I show that agents who have access to a non-secure savings technology can be better off than those who only have access to secure savings.saving, borrowing, microfinance, hyperbolic discounting

"Who's the thief?": Asymmetric Information and the Creation of Property Rights

This paper studies the creation of property rights in a state of anarchy and in the presence of uncertainty about a potential appropriator's ability. In a game of conflict, securing property can be achieved by spending resources for protection. We show that secure property rights will never emerge in equilibrium. The reason for this finding is not that it is not possible to secure property in principle, but that because of uncertainty agents will choose to protect their possessions against an expected appropriator and not against the most able one. Hence, agents voluntarily expose themselves to the risk of losing ownership. This finding has important consequences, since secure property rights are a fundamental prerequisite of economic activity, and insecure property may for example hinder the exploitation of mutually beneficial trade opportunities or distort investment and production incentives.Asymmetric Information, Property Rights, Conflict

CRiBAC: Community-centric role interaction based access control model

As one of the most efficient solutions to complex and large-scale problems, multi-agent cooperation has been in the limelight for the past few decades. Recently, many research projects have focused on context-aware cooperation to dynamically provide complex services. As cooperation in the multi-agent systems (MASs) becomes more common, guaranteeing the security of such cooperation takes on even greater importance. However, existing security models do not reflect the agents' unique features, including cooperation and context-awareness. In this paper, we propose a Community-based Role interaction-based Access Control model (CRiBAC) to allow secure cooperation in MASs. To do this, we refine and extend our preliminary RiBAC model, which was proposed earlier to support secure interactions among agents, by introducing a new concept of interaction permission, and then extend it to CRiBAC to support community-based cooperation among agents. We analyze potential problems related to interaction permissions and propose two approaches to address them. We also propose an administration model to facilitate administration of CRiBAC policies. Finally, we present the implementation of a prototype system based on a sample scenario to assess the proposed work and show its feasibility. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Secure migration of WebAssembly-based mobile agents between secure enclaves

Cryptography and security protocols are today commonly used to protect data at-rest and in-transit. In contrast, protecting data in-use has seen only limited adoption. Secure data transfer methods employed today rarely provide guarantees regarding the trustworthiness of the software and hardware at the communication endpoints. The field of study that addresses these issues is called Trusted or Confidential Computing and relies on the use of hardware-based techniques. These techniques aim to isolate critical data and its processing from the rest of the system. More specifically, it investigates the use of hardware isolated Secure Execution Environments (SEEs) where applications cannot be tampered with during operation. Over the past few decades, several implementations of SEEs have been introduced, each based on a different hardware architecture. However, lately, the trend is to move towards architecture-independent SEEs. As part of this, Huawei research project is developing a secure enclave framework that enables secure execution and migration of applications (mobile agents), regardless of the underlying architecture. This thesis contributes to the development of the framework by participating in the design and implementation of a secure migration scheme for the mobile agents. The goal is a scheme wherein it is possible to transfer the mobile agent without compromising the security guarantees provided by SEEs. Further, the thesis also provides performance measurements of the migration scheme implemented in a proof of concept of the framework

The commons with capital markets

We explore commons problems when agents have access to capital markets. The commons has a high intrinsic rate of return but its fruits cannot be secured by individual agents. Resources transferred to the capital market earn lower returns, but are secure. In a two period model, we assess the consequences of market access for the commons' survival and welfare; we compare strategic and competitive equilibria. Market access generally speeds extinction, with negative welfare consequences. Against this, it allows intertemporal smoothing, a positive effect. In societies in which the former effect dominates, market liberalisation may be harmful. We reproduce the multiple equilibria found in other models of competitive agents; when agents are strategic, extinction dates are unique. Strategic agents generally earn their surplus by delaying the commons' extinction; in unusual cases, strategic agents behave as competitive ones even when their numbers are small.commons, capital markets, Washington Consensus, property rights