Safe buzz: Adaptive security for multi-agents through situational awareness

Multi-agent systems deal with interactive agents that possess some degree of autonomy and cooperate towards the achievement of their goals. Multi-agent systems often need to operate in unsafe environments, and hence there is a need for situational awareness and risk assessment security mechanism that can evaluate agent data to detect threats and analyse the risk posed by them. Basic belief-desire-intention (BDI) architecture lacks a framework that would facilitate effective communication, to bring about situational awareness among agents in an insecure environment. This paper addresses the problems faced by a group of agents lacking global knowledge and global communications, by the introduction of a belief sharing and risk assessment mechanism. We have extended basic BDI architecture with the concept of situational awareness and adaptive risk management. With the proposed architecture, agents can gain awareness by exchanging beliefs, ascertaining the truth of such beliefs and measuring the credibility of a peer agent. Moreover agents can modify their level of alertness by monitoring the risks faced by them and by their peers. This enables the agents to detect and assess risks faced by them in an efficient manner, thereby increasing operational efficiency and resistance against attacks.