Organized Anonymous Agents

Martijn Warnier, Frances Bra
2007 Third International Symposium on Information Assurance and Security  
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
more » ... d in an agent platform. Performance measures for an anonymity service implemented for the AgentScape platform provides some insight in the overhead involved. * This paper extends preliminary work reported at EUMAS'06 [23] 1 In certain classes of applications agent platforms cannot accept agents that are completely anonymous for a number of reasons. The most simple is related to malicious agents: if such agents run havoc on an agent platform and their owners cannot be traced, an agent platform owner is unable to take any (legal) action against the agent owner, nor can it recognize future malicious agents coming from the same source. The need for agent platforms to be able to trace agent owners, as well as other identity management facilities [5] , are assumed in this paper.
doi:10.1109/ias.2007.34 dblp:conf/IEEEias/WarnierB07 fatcat:faqvzuixyzf5bharcz3rebsi4y