Distributed security for multi-agent systems - review and applications

As two major communication technologies, the internet and wireless, are maturing rapidly to dominate our civilised life, the authors urgently need to re-establish users´ confidence to harvest new potential applications of large-scale distributed systems. Service agents and distributed multi-agent systems (MASs) have shown the potential to help with this move as the lack of trust caused by heavily compromised security issues and concerns coupled with the out-of-date solutions are hindering the progress. The authors therefore seek new remedies to ensure that the continuity in developing new economies is maintained through building new solutions to address today´s techno-economical problems. Following a scan of the literature the authors discuss the state-of-the-art progress followed by some observations and remarks for the researchers in the field. Here the authors recognise the need for new ´distributed security´ solutions, as an overlay service, to rejuvenate and exploit the distributed artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for secure MAS as a natural solution to pave the way to enable a long awaited application paradigm of the near future.