Authors:
Matteo Cristani
;
Erisa Karafili
and
Luca Viganò
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy
Keyword(s):
Multi-agent systems, Coalitions, Security, Blocking attacks.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
;
Collective Intelligence
;
Cooperation and Coordination
;
Distributed and Mobile Software Systems
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Group Decision Making
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Multi-Agent Systems
;
Privacy, Safety and Security
;
Software Engineering
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
Similar to what happens between humans in the real world, in open multi-agent systems distributed over the Internet, such as online social networks or wiki technologies, agents often form coalitions by agreeing to act as a whole in order to achieve certain common goals. However, agent coalitions are not always a desirable feature of a system, as malicious or corrupt agents may collaborate in order to subvert or attack the system. In this paper, we consider the problem of hidden coalitions, whose existence and the purposes they aim to achieve are not known to the system, and which carry out underhand attacks, a term that we borrow from military terminology. We give a first approach to hidden coalitions by introducing a deterministic method that blocks the actions of potentially dangerous agents, i.e. possibly belonging to such coalitions. We also give a non-deterministic version of this method that blocks the smallest set of potentially dangerous agents. We calculate the computational
cost of our two blocking methods, and prove their soundness and completeness.
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