Aspect-Oriented Design and Implementation of Secure Agent Communication System

Programming distributed and large systems requires dividing the extensive programming codes into smaller entities such as; modules, objects, agents, etc. Especially multi-agent systems (MAS) are emerged as a promising paradigm for constructing complex distributed software-intensive systems. For successfully and effectively achieving a common goal in MAS, agents need to interact with each other according to a coordination protocol. In order to use the agent technology in real applications, it is inevitable to ensure security of this coordination protocol, which crosscuts with different software modules in MAS by hindering modularity and independence. Therefore, the coordination concern should be separated from computation modules, and should be designed by security experts specifically. Aspect-oriented programming has been demonstrated to be an attractive technology for separation of concerns. It can also help the development of secure communication mechanism of MASs. This paper presents an aspect-oriented approach for separation of secure communication mechanisms from agents' functional components. By this approach, it is aimed to enable system developers to implement the MAS's main application codes and security codes separately.