A real-time multi-agent system for cryptographic key generation using imaging-based textural features

Abstract

Traditional network security protocols depend on exchanging the security keys between the network nodes, and thus opposing the network to different classes of security threats. In this paper, a multi-agent system for cryptographic key generation is proposed for real-time networks. The proposed key generation technique generates a 256-bit security key for the advanced encryption standard (AES) algorithm using the textural features of digital images. By implementing this key generation technique at both the sender and receiver network nodes, the process of exchanging the security keys through the network would be eliminated, and thus making communication between network nodes robust against different security threats. Simulation results over a real-time network show the efficiency of the proposed system in reducing the overhead of the security associations performed by the IPsec protocol. On the other hand, the proposed agent-based system shows a high efficiency in guaranteeing the quality-of-service (QoS) of the real-time requests in terms of miss-ratio and total average delay through applying the best scheduling algorithm.