Probing Attacks on Multi-Agent Systems Using Electronic Institutions

In open multi-agent systems, electronic institutions are used to form the interaction environment by defining social norms for group behaviour. However, as this paper shows, electronic institutions can be turned against agents to breach their security in a variety of ways. We focus our attention on probing attacks using electronic institutions specified in the Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC) language. LCC is a choreography language used to define electronic institutions in agent systems. A probing attack is an attack against the confidentiality of information systems. In this paper, we redefine the probing attack in conventional network security to be applicable in a multiagent system domain, governed by electronic institutions. We introduce different probing attacks against LCC interaction models and suggest a secrecy analysis framework for these interactions. The proposed framework could be used to detect the possibility of certain probing attacks and to identify some forms of malicious electronic institutions.