Maintenance agents for the computer security domain

Maintenance agents have the purpose of ensuring that the specified conditions are fulfilled, by employing their capabilities and exploiting the local context information. They offer the benefits of decentralised processing and distributed control, robustness and scalability. The maintenance agents described described in this paper were designed for the network intrusion detection domain and exploit the anomaly detection strategy. The reactive nature of these agents ensures that the network traffic obeys the rules describing normal traffic patterns. Maintenance agents leverage users from specifying normal traffic characteristics, are able to adapt to the environment in which they operate and take time information into consideration.