Organized Anonymous Agents

Anonymity can be of great importance in distributed agent applications such as e-commerce & auctions. This paper proposes and analyzes a new approach for organized anonymity of agents based on the use of pseudonyms. A novel naming scheme is presented that can be used by agent platforms to provide automatic anonymity for all agents on its platform, or, alternatively, to provide anonymity on demand. The paper also introduces a new technique, based on the use of handles, that can be fully integrated in an agent platform. Performance measures for an anonymity service implemented for the AgentScape platform provides some insight in the overhead involved.

[1]  Frances M. T. Brazier,et al.  Anonymity and software agents: An interdisciplinary challenge , 2004, Artificial Intelligence and Law.

[2]  Rafal Leszczyna,et al.  Untraceability of mobile agents , 2005, AAMAS '05.

[3]  José Meseguer,et al.  Unwinding and Inference Control , 1984, 1984 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

[4]  Ronggong Song,et al.  Anonymous Communications for Mobile Agents , 2002, MATA.

[5]  Ross J Anderson.  The Formal Verification of a Payment System , 1999 .

[6]  Robert R. Moeller,et al.  Network Security , 1993, Inf. Secur. J. A Glob. Perspect..

[7]  Chris J. Mitchell,et al.  Limits to Anonymity When Using Credentials , 2004, Security Protocols Workshop.

[8]  Michael Walfish,et al.  A layered naming architecture for the internet , 2004, SIGCOMM '04.

[9]  Corien Prins,et al.  New Rules for Anonymous Electronic Transactions? An Exploration of the Private Law Implications of Digital Anonymity , 2001, Journal of Information, Law and Technology.

[10]  Flavio D. Garcia,et al.  Off-Line Karma: A Decentralized Currency for Peer-to-peer and Grid Applications , 2005, ACNS.

[11]  Frances M. T. Brazier,et al.  Organized Anonymity in Agent Systems , 2006, EUMAS.

[12]  Frances M. T. Brazier,et al.  Scalable Middleware Environment for Agent-Based Internet Applications , 2004, PARA.

[13]  Ziyan Maraikar.  Resource and Service Discovery for Mobile Agent Platforms , 2006 .

[14]  Radia J. Perlman,et al.  Network security - private communication in a public world , 2002, Prentice Hall series in computer networking and distributed systems.

[15]  Andrei Serjantov,et al.  On the anonymity of anonymity systems , 2004 .

[16]  Frances M. T. Brazier,et al.  Identity Management in Agent Systems , 2006 .

[17]  Reinout van Schouwen.  Design and implementation of a secure, decentralized location service for agent platforms , 2006 .

[18]  Nick Mathewson,et al.  Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router , 2004, USENIX Security Symposium.

[19]  Andrew C. Myers,et al.  Language-based information-flow security , 2003, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[20]  Agostino Poggi,et al.  Security and Trust in Agent-Oriented Middleware , 2003, OTM Workshops.

[21]  André Weimerskirch,et al.  A Distributed Light-Weight Authentication Model for Ad-hoc Networks , 2001, ICISC.

[22]  Michael Luck,et al.  Agent technology: Enabling next generation computing , 2003 .

[23]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  The Michigan Internet AuctionBot: a configurable auction server for human and software agents , 1998, AGENTS '98.

[24]  Butler W. Lampson,et al.  A note on the confinement problem , 1973, CACM.

[25]  Volker Roth,et al.  Concepts and architecture of a security-centric mobile agent server , 2001, Proceedings 5th International Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems.