Agents Ownership Setting by User Fingerprints

Agent ownership is a difficult task that touches legal domain. Agent ownership implies that a specific person or organization (the owner) is responsible for the agent’s actions. Security requirements in the agent ownership setting process are the identification of the owner and the protection of the identity information carried by an agent. The first issue deals with users authentication process while the second issue deals with information encryption techniques, certificates etc. In this paper a new user authentication system requiring owner fingerprint in addition to the standard username/password pair is addressed. Fingerprint based identification systems exploits two basic premises: persistence, i.e. the basic characteristic of fingerprints do not change with time, and individuality, i.e. a fingerprint is unique to an individual. The implementation of the enhanced authentication system in the JADE-S platform, a FIPA compliant platform formed by the combination of the standard version of JADE with the JADE security plug-in, is also outlined.