Efficient Secure Communication for Distributed Multi-Agent Systems

The use of multi-agent systems has been increasing and with it the need to improve communication performance and to make it secure. In a system with hundreds of agents, in which their reaction must be fast, it is essential to ensure low latency and high message throughput. These agents can work in a cooperative or competitive environment and, especially in the last, the absence of secure communications opens the possibility for malicious agents to intercept and/or change the content of the messages. This paper explores alternatives to the Message Transport Service as described in the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents architecture for multi-agent systems, namely using message-oriented middleware. It also introduces a new component to the typical multi-agent system architecture, the certification authority service. This component is responsible for creating certificates that platform agents can use to ensure their identity and communicate safely. This architecture also manages external agents distribution across several machines, similar to a federated environment, making the system more suitable for computationally demanding scenarios. The architecture was tested on an existing simulation platform, showing very good results.