Biometric Features for Mobile Agents Ownership

Multi-Agent System (MAS) architectures can be used for e-Business application due their flexibility, scalability and interoperability. Agent ownership implies that a specific person or organization (the owner) is responsible for the agent's actions. Agents, whose ownership was certainly fixed, could operate on behalf of their owner to make transactions, to buy or sell products. Security requirements in the agent ownership setting process are the identification of the owner and the protection of the identification information carried by an agent. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using biometrics in mobile agent systems for owner authentication. Biometric features can be used in both agents ownership setting process and in the protection of the agents information. Certification Authorities could also check against the owner reputation level before grant or deny permission of performing certain actions. In order to show the feasibility of the approach, the proposed techniques have been implemented and tested as an extension of the JADE-S platform.