Design and Implementation of Security Mechanisms for a Hierarchical Community-Based Multi-Agent System

Recently, several community-based systems have been developed; however, almost all such systems have been developed as Web-server-based systems. Thus, server administrator can easily eavesdrop on user communications, since they have to send/receive information through the server. Therefore, we propose multi-agent-based peer-to-peer (P2P) system wherein each peer manages his/her information and exchanges it with other peers directly. This, thus, resolves the problems posed by Web-server-based systems; however, we have to consider attacks from malicious third parties. This study designs and implements security protocols/mechanisms for a hierarchical community-based multi-agent system. Furthermore, if we consider a practical use case, we should be able to demonstrate that the proposed system can be implemented by combining it with existing security techniques for more reliable and rapid deployment. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed security system and present an example application.