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Presenter Hari Surineni

Adding Security & Trusts in Multi-Agent Systems H.Chi Wong & Katia Sycara Carnegie Mellon University Research supported by DARPA contract and ONR grant 2002 Course Comp7760 - Control of Autonomous agents, Professor Stan Franklin. Presenter Hari Surineni. Definition. Multi Agent Systems (MASs)

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Presenter Hari Surineni

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  1. Adding Security & Trusts in Multi-Agent SystemsH.Chi Wong & Katia SycaraCarnegie Mellon UniversityResearch supported by DARPA contract and ONR grant 2002Course Comp7760 - Control of Autonomous agents, Professor Stan Franklin Presenter Hari Surineni

  2. Definition Multi Agent Systems (MASs) MASs are societies whose individuals are software – delegatees (agents) acting on behalf of the owners or the delegators (people or organizations). In MASs, agents interact with other agents, non agent software and humans.

  3. Recap - Agent definition Dr Franklin‘ “An autonomous agent is a system situated within and a part of an environment that senses that environment and acts on it, over time, in pursuit of its own agenda and so as to effect what it senses in the future.’’ IBM Agent “Intelligent agents are software entities that carry out some set of operations on behalf of a user or another program with some degree of independence or automony , and in so doing, employ some knowledge or representations of the user’s goals or desires.”

  4. Recap - Agent definition Agent - We define an agent as an autonomous, (preferably) intelligent, collaborative, adaptive computational entity. Here, intelligence is the ability to infer and execute needed actions, and seek and incorporate relevant information, given certain goals.

  5. Goal of this paper • Identify some security and trust issues faced by MASs • Address trust issues • Design security infrastructure applicable to MASs • Introduce Retsina – software agent (Reusable Environment for Task-Structured Intelligent Networked Agents)

  6. Agent details • Environment – People, Internet, software agents • Motivational aspects – security, trusting • Sensing environment – Strings, Characters • Action of the agents – Lookup table, Querying , matching

  7. What can MASs do? • Have autonomy/intelligence to do various tasks with little or no human intervention • When deployed in WAN’s (Internets)… - Access remote service providers - Search information on the web - Carry out sale transactions - E Commerce

  8. Retsina • A re-usable multi agent infrastructure for building agents with capabilities of inter-agent, message-passing communication. • The Retsina infrastructure can be used by agent developers to quickly develop agents for different applications. It is the most general and flexible MAS infrastructure known today. Retsina - Greek Wines of the Gods. Retsina has its origins in ancient Greece. Its history goes back more than 3,000 years ago in Attica region. It was born of the need to preserve and ship wines in pine-pitch sealed vessels. Ancient wines varied substantially in quality and tended to spoil. In efforts to avoid this, wines were often adulterated with exotic ingredients, from herbs to seawater.

  9. Retsina Retsina has 2 types of infrastructure entities 1)Agent name servers - ANS ANS keeps am mapping of agents id’s to agent’s physical addresses. 2)Matchmakers – MM Matchmakers keep a mapping of agent id’s to agent capabilities.

  10. Retsina • Retsina has 3 classes of agents -Interface -Task and -Information agents • Interface agents provide human interface. • Task agents perform specific tasks. (example, buying /selling of stock) • Information agents are associated with information sources. They provide information to other agents in the system. (example, provide stock quotes from NYSE)

  11. Graphical representation of the RETSINA MAS

  12. Retsina http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~softagents/retsina.html Retsina has been used in several applications. • Visitor hosting system • Aircraft maintenance • Financial portfolio management

  13. Retsina in the news • RoboCup Rescue US Open, Atlanta, Ga., May 7-10, 2005 At the RoboCup Rescue US Open, the Carnegie Mellon University and The University Pittsburgh Team RAPTOR won 1st place in the Advanced Mobility class, 1st place in the Advanced Autonomy class and 3rd place in the RoboRescue League. RAPTOR was the only team to enter robots in every round of the competition. The RAPTOR team fielded three robots, a Pioneer, a PER and a Tarantula, that coordinated to search and find victims in 3 arenas of increasing difficulty. Congratulations to Mary Koes, Anton Chechetka, and Robin Glinton. The team is advised by Mike Lewis (U. of Pitt), Illah Nourbakhsh (CMU), Katia Sycara (CMU). The research, sponsored by an NSF ITR, aims at developing effective schemes for coordinating multi-agent teams of heterogeneous robots, software agents and people in disaster response.

  14. Security threats in MASs • Corrupted naming and Matchmaking services • Insecure communication channels • Insecure delegation • Lack of accountability

  15. Security threats in MASs Corrupted naming & Matchmaking services Application agents depend on ANS’s to locate other agents and MM to find other service providers. Both naming and MM services can get corrupted by untrustworthy ANS’s and MM. For example, a misbehaving MM may arbitrarily delete an advertisement entry.

  16. Security threats in MASs Insecure communication channels • Agents should know with certain they think the agents they are talking to. (authentication) • Messages are not corrupted or intercepted during transmission. (integrity) • Message communications is private if they choose to do so. (confidentiality) • No one can deny having sent a message. (non – repudiation)

  17. Security threats in MASs Insecure delegation Agents act on behalf of their deployers but in certain situations, we want to know if agents are delegates of whom they claim to be. For example, before giving out my account info to an agent my bank would want to know that the agent is in fact my delegate.

  18. Security threats in MASs Lack of accountability MAS’s deployed in open networks where agents interact with strangers that come and go. There is no reason for agents to trust each other. Deployers may be dishonest, software may be buggy and agent wrong doings may certainly happen. If no one is help accountable for potential problems caused by misbehaving agents then users will hesitate to use the technology.

  19. Adding Security & Trust to MASs • Use trusted ANS and MM • Make agents uniquely identifiable and give them unforgeable proofs of identity. • Protect communication channels • Make agents prove that they are delegates of whom they claim to be. • Make deployers of agents liable for the actions of their agents

  20. Adding Security & Trust to MAS Use trusted ANS and MM • Service only valid requests. A request is valid if it comes from a rightful requester and the request itself ‘makes sense’ in the current state of ANS or the MM. For example, a request for unregistering an agent at a MM is invalid if the agent is not currently registered. • Insert (remove) an entry in their address/capability database in a way that is consistent with the request. • Give responses that are consistent with the content of their databases when queried.

  21. Adding Security & Trust to MAS Make agents uniquely identifiable and give them unforgeable proofs of identity • Spoofing can be avoided if the agents have unique ids and are required to show proof’s of identity when interacting with other agents. ANS and MM can make of this to avoid unregistering someone else.

  22. Adding Security & Trust to MAS Protect communication channels • All messages should be authenticated and any corruptions should be detectable by their recipients and also, communicating parties shd be able to make communication confidential. Make agents prove that they are delegates of whom they claim to be • When ever the identity of the agents delegator matters the delegatees /agents show knowledge of secrets that only their delegators know about. Banking agent should show knowledge of my PIN)

  23. Adding Security & Trust to MAS Make deployers of agents liable for the actions of their agents • If we make deployers liable for the actions of their agents then they are less likely to deploy buggy agents and to initiate cheating themselves. • Also, when misbehaviors occur, we can hold someone accountable and apply punishments or demand indemnification. This will increase the level of trust users have on the MAS.

  24. Related work • Yenta – matchmaking agent to find people with similar interests on the net ; main security concern was privacy and how to find out the profile of the real person. • Agent based PKI Public Key Infrastructure • Secure marketplaces for mobile Java agents

  25. Contributions & Future work • Identified few security threats in MASs • Proposed a security design architecture • Java implementation of the design is in progress and will be added to Retsina infrastructure • Examine Retsina in applications in different domains

  26. Contributions & Future work • Honesty of the agents themselves is also not addressed • Problems in any Public key based system approach. • Delegation issue needs to be resolved • Find other security issues

  27. Questions ?? Next presentation Continue the topic • Design aspects of a security infra-structure for MAS • Uses Public & Private key concepts & SSL

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