On agent technology for e-commerce: trust, security and legal issues

Abstract

The vision of future electronic marketplaces (e-markets) is that of markets being populated by autonomous intelligent entities—software, trading, e-agents—representing their users or owners and conducting business on their behalf. For this vision to materialize, one fundamental issue that needs to be addressed is that of trust. First, users need to be able to trust that the agents will do what they say they do. Second, they need to be confident that their privacy is protected and that the security risks involved in entrusting agents to perform transactions on their behalf are minimized. Finally, users need to be assured that any legal issues relating to agents trading electronically are fully covered as they are in traditional trading practices. In this paper we consider the barriers for the adoption of agent technology in electronic commerce (e-commerce) which pertain to trust, security and legal issues. We discuss the perceived risks of the use of agents in e-commerce and the fundamental issue of trust in this context. Issues regarding security, and how some of these can be addressed through the use of cryptography, are described. The impact of the use of agent technology on the users' privacy and how it can be both protected as well as hindered by it is also examined. Finally, we discuss the legal issues that arise in agent-mediated e-commerce and discuss the idea of attributing to software agents the status of legal persons or e-persons and the various implications.

Security of Mobile Agent Platforms using RBAC based on Dynamic Role Assignment

“…Trp involves many periods related to the manipulation performed, which are listed in Table 1 Since the migration of the permission agent is performed internally without any network configuration or charges, and also because this agent carries a small amount of information, we can neglect the time cost dedicated for this operation. Thus, the Equation (1) (2) In order to prove the efficiency of our approach regarding large and complex conditions, we have conducted an experiment to show the scalability of our approach face to three situations:  Situation A: when multiple subjects are requesting different roles and different permissions;  Situation B: when multiple subjects are requesting the same role with different permissions;  Situation C: when multiple subjects are requesting the same role and the same permission; Figure 10 illustrates the results of this experiment, which clearly attests of the scalability of our approach, in terms of time performance, face to the increase of subjects under the three mentioned situations.…”

An overview of current ontology meta-matching solutions

“…• Agent communication (Fasli, 2007). Existing software agents need to share a common terminology in order to facilitate the data interchange between them.…”

Partial identities as a foundation for trust and reputation

“…Agent-mediated electronic commerce refers to electronic commerce in which agent technologies are applied to provide personalized, continuously running, semi-autonomous behavior. In agent-mediated electronic commerce applications security, privacy, trust, and reputation play a crucial role [24].…”

“…Anonymity is characterized by the fact that an agent can interact with other parties in a form that these other parties do not know the identity of the agent [24]. For instance, Korba et al [29] presents an anonymous agent communication mechanism based on the Tor network [30].…”