Organized Anonymity in Agent Systems

Anonymity is of great importance in distributed agent applications such as e-commerce & auctions. This paper proposes and analyzes a new approach for organized anonymity of agents based on the use of pseudonyms. A novel naming scheme is presented that can be used by agent platforms to provide anonymity for each individual agent. The paper introduces two distinct techniques, one based on handles and another based on agent spawning. Both techniques can be integrated into agent platform middleware, automatically guaranteeing anonymity for all individual agents. The applicability of this approach is evaluated for three agent platforms: AgentScape, JADE and SeMoA.