An agent-based user-authentication system

Managing the necessary public and private keys in a large organization is a serious challenge. Software agents can be an adaptive and responsive mechanism for managing users trying to connect to network resources. BTexact Technologies Intelligent Systems Laboratory has developed the Phobos agent architecture. Phobos uses a distributed team of cooperative autonomous agents to collectively authenticate user access requests. The advantages are that the agents can query multiple information sources to select the level of trust to delegate to a user and that n agents must concur to authenticate the user, hence increasing overall security. Phobos provides numerous security services to automate user authentication and trustmanagement processes.