A Multi-Agent System’s Approach to Communication Security in the Web
João Paulo Pimentão, Pedro A. C. Sousa, Pedro Amaral, Adolfo Steiger-Garção
Universidade Nova de Lisboa Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia and UNINOVA - Instituto de
Desenvolvimento de Novas Tecnologias, Caparica, Portugal
{pim, pas, pma, asg}@uninova.pt
Abstract
This paper presents the Split and Merge method, an
approach to provide secure communication over the
Internet using software agents. Instead of relying
exclusively on the traditional approaches of ciphering the
message at the source and then sending it over a
communication channel, the Split and Merge method
focuses on denying access to the message itself. This is
achieved by splitting the message in parts and sending
them to the destination through different routes, in an ad-
hoc network of agents.
The method is detailed in the paper and the current
implementation using multi agent systems is presented.
The solutions found to deal with error detection and
correction (loss of message fragments, message integrity
and node misbehavior) are then discussed and further
research directions are presented.
1. Introduction
The focus of this paper is on providing communication
security using agent-based systems; in particular it
presents a new way to preserve the secrecy of the content
of the messages being transmitted between two parties.
Traditionally, this kind of security relies strongly on
cryptography.
Most of the usual approaches to cryptography are
based on two principles: the secrecy of the
ciphering/deciphering key and the robustness of the
ciphering functions.
Regarding key secrecy, methods have been designed
ranging from the Diffie Hellman key agreement protocol
[1] to the public key cryptography of Rivest, Shamir and
Adleman [2].
For the second principle, the focus has been put in the
infeasibility of determining, in a reasonable time, the
solutions for some mathematical functions without the
possession of the key (such as the case of the RSA
ciphering method). Alas, the development of
computational power as shown that what is “impossible”
today may become common practice tomorrow. The
increase of CPU speed is directly related to the increase of
component density that has been following “Moore's
Law” (stating that component density in integrated circuits
would double each year), and which most experts believe
will hold up to 2020 [3,4] although, in recent years, a
slight decline has been noticed on the increase of the
density of the circuits, mainly due to physical limitations.
It is obvious that the increase of computational power
will also give rise to new cipher algorithms and methods
that will try to maintain the competitive advantage over
the potential threats.
Instead of solely relying on the lack of computational
power for protecting the message communication, the
proposed method (Split and Merge) further enhances the
protection by providing inability to get hold of the
message.
Other efforts have been made in approaches that may
seem related to this, but they have different principles and
objectives.
Some of such works include the long known principle
of steganography, whose purpose is to hide the existence
of communication [5, 6].
Other works try to hide the source of the
communication in the World Wide Web, such as the work
by Reiter and Rubin in Crowds [7] or the one by
Goldschlag, Reed and Syverson in the Onion Routing
Protocol [8].
2. The principle behind Split and Merge
In the Split and Merge method, the security of the
message does not rely solely on the ability to decipher the
message, but also on the ability to get the message itself. It
does not deal with ciphering the contents of the message,
but in splitting the message into fragments (as many and
as small as whished) so that the possession of a fragment
does not provide information about the contents of the
message.
The next key concept is that the routing towards the
destination node, of each fragment of the message, is done
through different paths. This is done randomly, so that the
paths (the list of nodes between the source and the
destination) followed by each fragment are different. Its
purpose is to decrease the possibility, which an attacker
Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI’04)
0-7695-2100-2/04 $ 20.00 IEEE
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