A literature review of security mechanisms employed by mobile agents

This paper performs a survey on the state of the art in the security and access controls mechanisms employed by multi agent systems as a form of data transaction, with special emphasis on their security threats and how these issues are currently being tackled for multi-agent systems. In this paper we provide a brief summary of current approaches and provide comments on their relevance, implementation and safety assumptions behind their safe operation on real systems with sensitive data. We also take special notice on the security issues approached by each one of the analysed proposals and the sometimes ingenious ways proposed by different authors to solve them. We also pay special attention to issues related with the authentication, confidentiality, integrity and access control mechanisms employed to minimise security incidents. Nowadays multi-agent systems are increasingly being researched and deployed to solve complex interoperability issues that normally occur between different institutions. The final result of this survey is a summary aggregation of knowledge about security and access control practices for multi agent models and implementations.