Agent Trustworthiness
Lora L. Kassab, Jeffrey M. Voas · Lecture notes in computer science · 1998
Agent-based technology could revolutionize the manner by which distributed computation is performed. The fact that the information returned by an agent to the agent owner cannot be validated by the owner is impeding the widespread adoption of agent-based computing. Our paper addresses this concern by proposing a new type of software assertion to increase observability by providing agent owner’s with agent state “snap-shots.” These snap-shots provide agent owners with: (1) a means to determine whether its agent’s results are trustworthy (derived from one or more possibly untrusted hosts), (2) information to debug a roving agent, (3) a greater ability to meet real-time constraints, (i.e., agent owners can determine if and when other agents need to be dispatched in order to fulfill the overall agent computation), and (4) a means to identify hosts systems that are resource-deficient, grant insuffient access rights, or tamper with agents. This is valuable information for subsequent agent computations. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.