Security Issues in FIPA Agents

FIPA is one of the main standards available within the software agent domain today. Software agents are based on the distributed intelligent agent domain, and are a multi-agent system. FIPA operates in an open environment that opens up for security issues, such as the problem of authentication of agents, securing communication, and preventing unauthorised activity from hackers or malevolent agents. There are several freely available FIPA agent platforms developed through the EU ACTS and IST program available. So fare the main focus within the FIPA agent system domain has been on developing and testing, and little effort has been devoted to looking into the security issues. Security consists of maintaining confidentiality, integrity and availability of software, hardware and data. FIPA can be categorised as a software component consisting of code, which can be defined as data. FIPA agent systems can therefore be categorized as security critical systems vulnerable for security attacks such as eavesdropping, tampering, and denial of service attacks. This article will focus on security issues in FIPA agent systems by describing security and software agents in general before discussing and highlighting some of the unsolved security issues in FIPA agent systems.