Attacks and security solutions for agent communication in multi-agent systems

Abstract

Agent communication security has been a subject of much research in the recent past motivated by the need to effectively harness the social ability of agents to deploy distributed applications and conservatively utilize network bandwidth. Security of agent communication is inevitable to overcome the impediments that may hinder the performance of mobile agents to accomplish their designed objectives. Such, impediments encompass denial of service attack, man in the middle attack, eavesdropping, resource availability attack and replay attack. Researchers have made series of effort to combat these threats to agent communication using cryptographic signature, message encryption and access control to facilitate agent authentication and authorization. This study therefore, focuses on the review of the attacks and security solutions for mobile agent communication proposed by the researchers in the field of agent technology. Researchers then carried out comparative analysis of the various security mechanisms in literature and assess them using the parameters: authentication technique and network overheads.