Enforcing security in the agentscape middleware

Multi Agent Systems (MAS) provide a useful paradigm for accessing distributed resources in an autonomic and self-directed manner. Resources, such as web services, are in-creasingly becoming available in large distributed environ-ments. Currently, numerous multi agent systems are avail-able. However, for the multi agent paradigm to become a genuine mainstream success certain key features need to be addressed: the foremost being security. While security has been a focus of the MAS community, configuring and man-aging such multi agent systems typically remains non-trivial. Well defined and easily configurable security policies address this issue. A security architecture that is both flexible and featureful is prerequisite for a MAS. A novel security policy enforcement system for multi agent middleware systems is introduced. The system facilitates a set of good default configurations but also allows extensive scope for users to develop customised policies to suit their individual needs. An agent middleware, AgentScape, is used to illustrate the system