Security considerations in agent-based systems

Agent systems face all the security challenges involved with any system that sends messages. Delegating tasks to mobile programs, or to supposedly intelligent ones, raises another set of concerns. Agent-based systems also increase the connectedness and the complexity of the computing universe. As connectedness and complexity increase, new failure modes arise, some of which have security implications. These emergent security concerns are more speculative than the more traditional ones inherited from previous computing systems; the author mentions a few of the possibilities. The topics discussed include: controlling program execution, protecting agents, accidental agents, trusting data, and revealing data.