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Secure Agents

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Abstract

With the rapid proliferation of software agents, there comes an increased need for agents to ensure that they do not provide data and/or services to unauthorized users. We first develop an abstract definition of what it means for an agent to preserve data/action security. Most often, this requires an agent to have knowledge that is impossible to acquire – hence, we then develop approximate security checks that take into account, the fact that an agent usually has incomplete/approximate beliefs about other agents. We develop two types of security checks – static ones that can be checked prior to deploying the agent, and dynamic ones that are executed at run time. We prove that a number of these problems are undecidable, but under certain conditions, they are decidable and (our definition of) security can be guaranteed. Finally, we propose a language within which the developer of an agent can specify her security needs, and present provably correct algorithms for static/dynamic security verification.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Milano, Via Bramante 65, I-26013, Crema, Italy

    Piero A. Bonatti

  2. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 52900, Israel

    Sarit Kraus

  3. Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Sarit Kraus

  4. Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, Institute for Systems Research and Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    V.S. Subrahmanian

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  1. Piero A. Bonatti
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  2. Sarit Kraus
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  3. V.S. Subrahmanian
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Bonatti, P.A., Kraus, S. & Subrahmanian, V. Secure Agents. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 37, 169–235 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020233522878

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