A Multi-Agent System´s Approach to Communication Security in the Web

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.