Design and Implementation of Security Framework for FIPA Compliant Multi-Agent System SAGE

Abstract

Multi Agent System (MAS) technology introduces distributed, intelligent programming model in which software agents are executing in heterogeneous environment. Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) is a standard governing body which provides standards for achieving interoperability between software agents executing on different platform. As long as the platform is FIPA compliant it can interact with any FIPA compliant agent platform using agent communication language (ACL). The problem is that FIPA has given specification for achieving interoperability between agent platforms but it still lacks to provide any concrete abstract security architecture for different agent platforms. We have developed a FIPA compliant multi agent system SAGE (Scalable fAult tolerant agent Grooming Environment) and for that we have designed a decentralized interoperable security engine. Integrating security add on would be definitely an overhead on system operations but we have tried to design best mechanisms so to put least possible overhead. Our system is distributed managing security related tasks (agents authentication, system agents authentication on peer RMI channels, user authentication and authorization control for platform managerial activities) on local machine and do least possible interaction with peers because network latency causes delays and also we have provided multiple definitions for encryption and integrity and one can choose best suitable algorithms according to the needs by setting communication policy. For peer communication we have designed to have a machine level key rather generating different key for each agent that will put burden on system for key generation and management so we share a unique secret key between peer machines and all agents communicating between those peer machines will use that shared key. This produces efficiency in communication as only one time we share a secret key that takes on average 46 milliseconds. Our distributed model and machine level key sharing help us in achieving fault tolerance and low communication latency between peers as compared to other FIPA compliant platform like grasshopper. RSA based on asymmetric key puts an overhead of 200 milliseconds where as DES puts an overhead of 20 milliseconds on packet size with 500 Bytes payload and while using RSA this latency rate keep on rising constantly upwards more rapidly as compared to DES as our platform supports both implementations and by setting policy user can use any of the implementation according to his needs.