A Survey: Agent-based Software Technology Under the Eyes of Cyber Security, Security Controls, Attacks and Challenges

Abstract

Recently, agent-based software technology has received wide attention by the research community due to its valuable benefits, such as reducing the load on networks and providing an efficient solution for the transmission challenge problem. However, the major concern in building agent-based systems is related to the security of agents. In this paper, we explore the techniques used to build controls that guarantee both the protection of agents against malicious destination machines and the protection of destination machines against malicious agents. In addition, statistical-based analyses are employed to evaluate the level of maturity of the protection techniques to preserve the protection goals (the code and data, state, and itinerary of the agent), with and without the threat of attacks. Challenges regarding the security of agents are presented and highlighted by seven research questions related to satisfying cyber security requirements, protecting the visiting agent and the visited host machine from each other, providing robustness against advanced attacks that target protection goals, quantifying the security in agent-based systems, and providing features of self-protection and self-communication to the agent itself.

Intelligent System for Price Premium Prediction in Online Auctions

“…In addition, many issues should be taken into consideration during the preprocessing phase, such as ensuring data privacy [28,29,30,31]. Moreover, enhancing the performance using high performance computing techniques [32] as well as ensuring the security of the data using some hiding or blurring techniques is required [33], or employing agent based software technology for solving transmission challenge problem [34]. The previous issues do not be taken into consideration in this work, and they will be manipulated as a future work.…”

Dummy-Based Approach for Protecting Mobile Agents Against Malicious Destination Machines

“…Both the strengths and weaknesses of ABST come from the features of the agent as follows: (1) Adaptability, which means platform independence, whereby the agent can be executed on different machines with different operating systems; (2) Transparency and accountability, which means that the software agent runs on behalf of its owner, and the owner can ask the agent about both its current location and what has been accomplished; (3) Ruggedness, which enables the agent to run given low or high resources, interpreting different data formats; and (4) Mobility, which is a unique property of this technology. This means that the agent can The first three features of ABST (i.e., adaptability, transparency and accountability, and ruggedness) make it a powerful technology.…”

“…Since the DM has full control over the visiting mobile agent, it has the ability to tamper with the results of the executed mission, which in turn leads to loss of result integrity, or even the whole code (behavior of the agent). Moreover, the attacker (DM) can apply advanced attacks, such as alternation attacks [11], collusion attacks [12,13], and denial of service (DoS) attacks [2,14]. Furthermore, some malwares and advanced persistent threats can be easily distributed to steal data from the visiting agents [15,16].…”

“…One of the most important software technologies used to manage and perform tasks over the Internet is agent-based software technology (ABST). A software agent is defined as an independent program that runs on behalf of a network user [1,2]. Compared to other technologies such as message passing (MP) [3], remote procedure call (RPC) [4], and code on demand (CoD) [5], ABST achieves better performance in distributed systems in terms of scalability (for both increasing numbers of users and sizes of data), manipulation (at both access latency and tuning time levels), and network latency [2,6].…”

“…A software agent is defined as an independent program that runs on behalf of a network user [1,2]. Compared to other technologies such as message passing (MP) [3], remote procedure call (RPC) [4], and code on demand (CoD) [5], ABST achieves better performance in distributed systems in terms of scalability (for both increasing numbers of users and sizes of data), manipulation (at both access latency and tuning time levels), and network latency [2,6]. Moreover, ABST is highlighted in regard to solving transmission challenges when addressing big data, especially if the data are of images or videos [7,8].…”