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

Data provenance to audit compliance with privacy policy in the Internet of Things

Managing privacy in the IoT presents a significant challenge. We make the case that information obtained by auditing the flows of data can assist in demonstrating that the systems handling personal data satisfy regulatory and user requirements. Thus, components handling personal data should be audited to demonstrate that their actions comply with all such policies and requirements. A valuable side-effect of this approach is that such an auditing process will highlight areas where technical enforcement has been incompletely or incorrectly specified. There is a clear role for technical assistance in aligning privacy policy enforcement mechanisms with data protection regulations. The first step necessary in producing technology to accomplish this alignment is to gather evidence of data flows. We describe our work producing, representing and querying audit data and discuss outstanding challenges.Engineering and Applied Science

Dynamically Provisioning Isolation in Hierarchical Architectures

Abstract. Physical isolation provides tenants in a cloud with strong security guarantees, yet dedicating entire machines to tenants would go against cloud computing’s tenet of consolidation. A fine-grained isolation model allowing tenants to request fractions of dedicated hardware can provide similar guarantees at a lower cost. In this work, we investigate the dynamic provisioning of isolation at various levels of a system’s architecture, primarily at the core, cache, and machine level, as well as their virtualised equivalents. We evaluate recent technological developments, including post-copy VM migration and OS containers, and show how they assist in improving reconfiguration times and utilisation. We incorporate these concepts into a unified framework, dubbed SafeHaven, and apply it to two case studies, showing its efficacy both in a reactive, as well as an anticipatory role. Specifically, we describe its use in detecting and foiling a system-wide covert channel in a matter of seconds, and in implementing a multi-level moving target defence policy

Preventing unauthorized data flows

Trojan Horse attacks can lead to unauthorized data flows and can cause either a confidentiality violation or an integrity violation. Existing solutions to address this problem employ analysis techniques that keep track of all subject accesses to objects, and hence can be expensive. In this paper we show that for an unauthorized flow to exist in an access control matrix, a flow of length one must exist. Thus, to eliminate unauthorized flows, it is sufficient to remove all one-step flows, thereby avoiding the need for expensive transitive closure computations. This new insight allows us to develop an efficient methodology to identify and prevent all unauthorized flows leading to confidentiality and integrity violations. We develop separate solutions for two different environments that occur in real life, and experimentally validate the efficiency and restrictiveness of the proposed approaches using real data sets

Multi-level Access Control in the Data Pipeline of the International Supply Chain System

The Seamless Integrated Data Pipeline system was proposed to the European Union in order to overcome the information quality shortcomings of the current international supply chain information exchange systems. Next to identification and authorization of stakeholders, secure access control needs to be considered at design time of the new data pipeline system. This challenge is taken up in this paper. First, based on an analysis of the proposed data pipeline concept, access control requirements are being defined. Second, a new multi-level access control model is being designed. The resulting model organizes access control at two levels, namely, at country and at service level, herewith enabling secure information exchange between global stakeholders. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg