Attack States Identification in a Logical Framework of Communicating Agents

A channel is a logical space where agents make announcements publicly. Examples of such objects are forums, wikis and social networks. Several questions arise about the nature of such a statement as well as about the attitude of the agent herself in doing these announcements. Does the agent know whether the statement is true? Is this agent announcing that statement or its opposite in any other channel? Extensions to Dynamic Epistemic Logics have been proposed in the recent past that give account to public announcements. One major limit of these logics is that announcements are always considered truthful. It is however clear that, in real life, incompetent agents may announce false things, while deceitful agents may even announce things they do not believe in. In this thesis, we provide a logical framework, called Multiple Channel Logic (MCL), able to relate true statements, agent beliefs, and announcements on communication channels. We discuss syntax and semantics of this logic and show the behavior of the p

The spider-man behavior protocol: exploring both public and dark social networks for fake identity detection in terrorism informatics

Hiding true personality behind a fa\ue7ade is one of the basic tricks adopted by humans who live double lives for illegal purposes. In particular terrorists have historically adopted the protocol of a fa\ue7ade behaviour coupled with a second life consisting mainly in illegal activities and their planning.Nowadays a few cases of behaviours that hide a dangerous activity, possibly illegal, behind an apparentely neutral and mean public person, can be replicated, and sometimes just provided, by a social network profile. Recognizing that a social network profile is fake, in some extreme cases, a bot, and determining the contour relationships that limit such a condition is one of the most important weapons for terrorism fight.In this paper we show that what we name the \emph{Spider-man protocol}, a set of behaviour rules that bring to hiding a personality behind a fa\ue7ade, has several weaknesses, and it is prone to a set of attacks that permit to detect these behaviours. We provide the description of an experimental architecture that is used for determining violations of the protocol, and therefore breaches in the secrecy of the individual protection settled by the terrorists

A Topological Categorization of Agents for the Definition of Attack States in Multi-Agent Systems

We propose a topological categorization of agents that makes use of the multiple-channel logic (MCL) framework, a recently developed model of reasoning about agents. We firstly introduce a complete formalization of prejudices on agents' attitudes and propose an extension of the rules of the MCL framework. We then use RCC5 (the Region Connection Calculus) to categorize different agents in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) based on the collaboration, competence, and honesty of agents. We discuss the possibility of using RCC3 and RCC8 and generalize our results to define an upper bound on the number of different types of agents in MAS. Finally, we apply our topological categorization to a specific MAS that describes a Cyber-Physical System, for which we define, categorize and discuss the resulting attack states