A Novel Protocol for Security of Location Based Services in Multi-agent Systems

Abstract

Multi-agent systems are automated form of software technology to enhance many applications in our life. However, this technology does not come along with embedded security features which hindering its widespread usage in commercial systems such as those that depend on location-based services. This paper aims to design, develop, test and evaluate an efficient security protocol for the multi-agent system to support the secrecy of user location. At first, we have developed a new architectural approach, inspired by the well-known Kerberos protocol, that can provide a secure service for the end users. It offers the most important security requirements in this field, namely; mutual authentication, confidentiality, integrity, and authorization. The proposed security protocol so-called Multi-Agent Security using Enhanced Kerberos has been verified and validated using a formal verification tool called ProVerif. Also, we provide a comparison with the original Kerberos protocol in terms of efficiency, which tilts the balance to our protocol.