Client Agent Research Articles

Risks of Using Linux OS with Enabled Firmware Update Mechanism (Linux Vendor Firmware Service)

The article discusses the mechanism for updating the built-in software (firmware) in distributions of the Linux operating system (OS). Considering the import "substitution strategy" in Russia proposed in technology sector and the active transition to this OS, including in solutions related to the digitalization of the energy sector, the problem of additional control over the firmware update process, incl. in used domestic distributions (AstraLinux, AltLinux). At the moment most popular mechanism of automatic firmware update is Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), article includes brief description of its update process. Using software developed for complete monitoring LVFS metadata were found multiply inconsistencies of current scheme of firmware update — deleting of files from index, replacement of already uploaded images with same id. Also basing on client agent metadata it is possible to organize targeted substitution of binary images transferred by service directly to hardware bypassing built-in monitoring tools. Finally it is concluded that there are potential vulnerabilities in this mechanism and a solution is proposed in the form of organizing own service with additional layer for verification of "firmware" during process of its distribution. If scheme with additional security layer over base of popular and well proved by practice LVFS will be successful it can be used in industrial applications with including in future in appropriate standards as reference model.

Strategic Facility Location with Clients That Minimize Total Waiting Time

We study a non-cooperative two-sided facility location game in which facilities and clients behave strategically. This is in contrast to many other facility location games in which clients simply visit their closest facility. Facility agents select a location on a graph to open a facility to attract as much purchasing power as possible, while client agents choose which facilities to patronize by strategically distributing their purchasing power in order to minimize their total waiting time. Here, the waiting time of a facility depends on its received total purchasing power. We show that our client stage is an atomic splittable congestion game, which implies existence, uniqueness and efficient computation of a client equilibrium. Therefore, facility agents can efficiently predict client behavior and make strategic decisions accordingly. Despite that, we prove that subgame perfect equilibria do not exist in all instances of this game and that their existence is NP-hard to decide. On the positive side, we provide a simple and efficient algorithm to compute 3-approximate subgame perfect equilibria.

Agent Banking: An Agent of Financial Inclusion in Bangladesh

This research has been undertaken to explore the idea of agent banking as a mean of financial inclusion to serve the unbanked population expediently. Financial inclusion means bringing the unbanked populace within the formal financial net. This paper is concerned about agent banking initiatives towards financial inclusion as a cheaper alternative. This paper also investigates the significance and competence of agent banking in accessing the lower income people en route for financial inclusion. Based on the secondary sources, this paper reveals the way of opening up new opportunities for banking the unbanked or otherwise. The study concluded that by bringing the channel closer to the client agent banking can give banks more flexibility to distribute financial products and convenient access to formal financial net of a wide range of un-banked and under-banked populace and also reach potential customers which ensure the effective financial inclusion.

SMS Observer: A dynamic mechanism to analyze the behavior of SMS-based malware

Nowadays smartphones become an indispensable tool in many people's everyday life that makes themselves attractive targets for attackers. Among various malware targeting at smartphones, SMS-based malware is one of the most notorious ones. Though a number of Android dynamic analysis frameworks have been proposed to analyze SMS-based malware, most of these frameworks or some Android tools, such as Google Android Emulator, do not support an app or malware to send SMS messages to a real smartphone; hence, security researchers cannot use them directly to analyze the behavior of SMS-based malware. In our previous work, SMS Helper, we designed an application layer tool to allow an app or malware in an Android emulator to send and receive SMS messages to or from a real smartphone. Based on SMS Helper, this paper proposes an Android dynamic analysis framework, called SMS Observer, to assist security researchers to analyze SMS-based malware. SMS Observer integrates SMS Helper into it as a client agent, meanwhile, and it maintains the integrity of system logs. This paper also figures out a way to detect whether an app is executed in an emulator and describes how to use SMS Observer to prevent such evasion. Experimental results using real-world malware samples show SMS Observer is much more effective in detecting SMS-related behavior of SMS-based malware than existing frameworks, such as Google Android Emulator, Andrubis, CopperDroid, and DroidBox. SMS Observer can analyze sophisticated SMS-based malware samples and provide a comprehensive view of malicious behavior.

Real-Time Signature Recognition Using Neural Network

The human signature is an important biometric feature that is used to identify human identity. It is essential in preventing falsification of documents in numerous financial, legal, and other commercial settings. The computerized system enters many aspects of our life, security is one of them, continues developing in computer vision and artificial network leads researcher to develop computerized signature recognition. This paper proposed a real-time algorithm for signature recognition. It is based on client and server operation.in which, client agent captures a signature and sends it to the server through the network. The server receives data and performs processing on it. Processing algorithm is based on weightless neural network. It is chosen for its simplicity and few numbers of sample required for training. The algorithm is tested and evaluated and show the ability to process 4.7 images per second.

P4-IPsec: Site-to-Site and Host-to-Site VPN With IPsec in P4-Based SDN

In this work, we present P4-IPsec, a concept for IPsec in software-defined networks (SDN) using P4 programmable data planes. The prototype implementation features ESP in tunnel mode and supports different cipher suites. P4-capable switches are programmed to serve as IPsec tunnel endpoints. We also provide a client agent to configure tunnel endpoints on Linux hosts so that site-to-site and host-to-site application scenarios can be supported which are the base for virtual private networks (VPNs). While traditional VPNs require complex key exchange protocols like IKE to set up and renew tunnel endpoints, P4-IPsec benefits from an SDN controller to accomplish these tasks. One goal of this experimental work is to investigate how well P4-IPsec can be implemented on existing P4 switches. We present a prototype for the BMv2 P4 software switch, evaluate its performance, and publish its source code on GitHub. We explain why we could not provide a useful implementation with the NetFPGA SUME board. For the Edgecore Wedge 100BF-32X Tofino-based switch, we presented two prototype implementations to cope with a missing crypto unit. As another contribution of this paper, we provide technological background of P4 and IPsec and give a comprehensive review of security applications in P4, IPsec in SDN, and IPsec data plane implementations. According to our knowledge, P4-IPsec is the first implementation of IPsec for P4-based SDN.

Time-sensitive resource re-allocation strategy for interdependent continuous tasks

Abstract An increase in volumes of data and a shift towards live data enabled a stronger focus on resource-intensive tasks which run continuously over long periods. A Grid has potential to offer the required resources for these tasks, while considering a fair and balanced allocation of resources among multiple client agents. Taking this into account, a Grid might be unwilling to allocate its resources for long time, leading to task interruptions. This problem becomes even more serious if an interruption of one task may lead to the interruption of dependent tasks. Here, we discuss a new strategy for resource re-allocation which is utilized by a client with the aim to prevent too long interruptions by re-allocating resources between its own tasks. Those re-allocations are suggested by a client agent, but only a Grid can re-allocate resources if agreed. Our strategy was tested under the different Grid settings, accounting for the adjusted coefficients, and demonstrated noticeable improvements in client utilities as compared to when it is not considered. Our experiment was also extended to tests with environmental modelling and realistic Grid resource simulation, grounded in real-life Grid studies. These tests have also shown a useful application of our strategy.

The supreme agent strategy for efficient searching and manifesting vital cloud services

The supreme agent technique deals with devise and magnification of software agents for effectively discovery appropriate cloud services, cloud service agreement and cloud service assortment. This research work establishing an agent based strategy for composing variety of relevant cloud services and provides unified virtualized service to the cloud customers in a effective manner. The contribution of research work includes developing cloud service search engine for efficient cloud service discovery, and dealing both provider and consumer by means of supreme agent strategy. This supreme agent scheme uses an enhanced fuzzy based ranking algorithm. This supreme agent system works on behalf of cloud user and provider to list out various cloud providers with necessary information to enable the user to choose relevant cloud service in a reasonable time period. Cloud agreement mechanism facilitates the agreement activities among client agent & intermediate agent also among intermediate agent & supplier agent. Cloud service assortment facilitate the agent vigorously choose the Cloud services and records the display the available cloud services.

빅데이터의 효과적인 처리 및 활용을 위한 클라이언트-서버 모델 설계

빅데이터의 효과적인 처리 및 활용을 위한 클라이언트-서버 모델 설계

M0Droid: An Android Behavioral-Based Malware Detection Model

Anti-mobile malware has attracted the attention of the research and security community in recent years due to the increasing threat of mobile malware and the significant increase in the number of mobile devices. M0Droid, a novel Android behavioral-based malware detection technique comprising a lightweight client agent and a server analyzer, is proposed here. The server analyzer generates a signature for every application (app) based on the system call requests of the app (termed app behavior) and normalizes the generated signature to improve accuracy. The analyzer then uses Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient to identify malware with similar behavior signatures in a previously generated blacklist of malwares signatures. The main contribution of this research is the proposed method to generate standardized mobile malware signatures based on their behavior and a method for comparing generated signatures. Preliminary experiments running M0Droid against Genome dataset and APK submissions of Android client...

Enhancing launch pads for decision-making in intelligent mobility on-demand

Interacting with an application for shared mobility is a complex spatio-temporal task, considering the degrees of freedom in planning and preferences together with the dynamics of supply. Traditional approaches also rely on the disclosure of inherently private, discrete information from both vehicle and client to perform ride matching. Catering for both aspects, we have previously suggested an intuitive interface concept, launch pads. In this paper we extend launch pads by enhancing the visualisation in a third dimension. This representation provides a client with a more detailed choice set which should lead to improved decision-making. To examine the value of this enhancement, we implement a multi-agent simulation and observe a client agent's responses to 3D launch pads visualised according to three different fare models. Results show that a client's flexibility in space is dependent on the fare model chosen, and it is this offering which can increase a client's utility.

Giving Feedback to Clients

We examine a prevalent form of client–agent interaction through a feedback-giving game. In this game, a client undertakes a nontrivial task and is compensated based on her task performance, which is only made known to her when the client–agent interaction ends. Meanwhile, her performance is disclosed to an agent, who must then give the client feedback on her performance. Upon receiving the feedback, the client reports her happiness level, which in turn determines the agent's payoff. In eight studies involving 928 subjects, we vary the way the agent's cash earnings depend on the client's reported happiness. When we make the agent's earnings proportional to the client's reported happiness, the agent inflates his feedback, and the client reports a higher level of happiness (than that reported in a control condition where the agent always provides honest feedback). We show that neither the agent nor the client behaves altruistically in their reporting. The client reports being happier because she overestimates her performance and mistakenly believes that the agent's feedback is genuine. The agent stops inflating his feedback when doing so no longer benefits him. Finally, our main findings are shown to be robust with respect to several factors, including making the agent's feedback consequential in affecting the client's payoff. In summary, we show that the agent behaves opportunistically, and the client's overconfidence of her own performance is what makes this strategy successful. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1846 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.

Sensitive Semantics-Aware Personality Cloaking on Road-Network Environment

Recently, several cloaking methods based on K-anonymity and L-diversity has been proposed to protect the user’s location privacy for Location-based Services (LBS). Considering that a cloaking region could contain some semantic places, which can easily endanger the user’s privacy, it is not safe to cloak the user’s location only consider K-anonymity and L-diversity. This paper presents a novel personality privacy-preserving cloaking framework for the protection of sensitive positions on road-network environment. In our scheme, a Voronoi-partition graph is first learned from an urban network, and a Dominance Date Center (DDC) is introduced to take charge of the vertex’s Voronoi-partition (dominance space) data. Then, the θ-security semantics is introduced to measure the degree of sensitive semantics leakage. Thus, a lightweight agent running in the client can contract with DDC and process the sensitive semantics-aware cloaking algorithm to generate a cloaking region to meet K-anonymity and θ-security semantics. Final, not the anonymizer, but the client agent access direct into the LSP.

Implementing Security in Mobile Agents by using AES Technique

Mobile Agent is a program which travels from one platform to another in order to get its work done. An agent is safe in its owner site but when it ventures out and gets executed on some other platform, it becomes vulnerable to many attacks. There are many counter measures that have been proposed in this paper to overcome these attacks. Cryptography based technique i.e. Symmetric Key Algorithm (specifically AES) is one such counter measure taken to provide security. An example case study of client server application has been considered to address the issue of security. Mobile agent is implemented on the aglet client agent host using a platform known as Aglet. Aglet is a java object which moves in a network and gets executed on host which are aglet enabled. AES using Aglet and Java have been implemented to provide security to the mobile agent. The results show how the client agent and server agent can exchange information over internet in a secure manner. The private data entered by client agent is encrypted using AES key which is provided by the server agent to the client agent in an encrypted form. This means that only server agent can decrypt this because he has AES key. Keywords: Mobile Agent [MA], Aglets, AES, Encryption, Decryption

A Multi-Agent Personalized Query Refinement Approach for Academic Paper Retrieval in Big Data Environment

This paper proposes a multi-agent query refinement approach to realize personalized query expansion effective for academic paper retrieval in a Big Data environment. First, we use Hadoop as a platform to develop a formalized model to represent different types of large caches of data in order to analyze and process Big Data efficiently. Second, we use a client agent to verify user identities and monitor whether a device is ready to run a query-expanded task. We then use a query expansion agent to determine the domain that the initial query belongs to by applying a knowledgebased query expansion strategy and comprehensively considering users’ interests according to the intelligent devices they use by implementing a user-device-based query expansion strategy and a weighted query expansion strategy in order to obtain the optimized query expansion set. We compare our method with the conceptual retrieval method as well as other two lexical methods for query expansion, and we prove that our method has better average recall and average precision ratios.

Agents, clusters and components: A synergistic approach to the GSP

Grids provide access to a vast amount of computational resources for the execution of demanding computations. These resources are geographically distributed, owned by different organizations and are vastly heterogeneous. The aforementioned factors introduce uncertainty in all phases of a Grid Scheduling Process (GSP). This work describes a synergistic multidisciplinary approach which aims at addressing this uncertainty. It proposes a network of resource representatives (RRs), which maintain the more or less static characteristics of available workers they represent. Clustering techniques are used for the efficient searching in the network of RRs by client agents. After the discovery of possibly suitable resources, client agents and resource agents negotiate directly for the selection of the best available resource set. Finally, according to the characteristics of the selected resource set and its current state, we propose a component-based application configuration approach based on component variants, that adjusts the application for the forthcoming execution phase in the selected resource set. We evaluate our approach using simulation and we show that it outperforms centralized index approaches for large computational grids.

Forwarding of Multiple Messages to Multiple Destinations By Using Mobile Agents

Today in this competitive world where everybody depends on the mobile technology run with the need of possessing mobiles and enjoying the facilities of ease to send messages to their near and dear ones. People need to perform their tasks for informing, contacting and keeping an up to date of whatever is going around them. One such facility in our mobiles is forwarding of messages to people for fun or for awareness or when we want more number of people to know about something. The proposal is forwarding multiple messages to multiple destinations at the same time. The mobiles have the facility to forward a single message to multiple destinations. The messages can be forwarded using the push approach and the Mobile Agent Client and Mobile Agent Server. Since a mobile agent has certain properties which supports multiple message forwarding but affects the reliability certainly, mobile agents for sub servers can be a substitute as well. Messages will be selected in an order and the recipients’ numbers are be added. Once the sender toggles the option of ‘send’, the multiple messages selected must be sent to the recipients in the order they are selected to send. It can either be based on the messages like one by one message must first be sent to the recipients thus all the messages selected reaches the recipient 1 then all the messages will be sent to the next recipient 2 and so on or message 1 is sent to all the recipients and message 2 is sent to all the recipients and so on. Gateways in Mobile Agent Server can be used for the store and forward technique. If the network is busy and any message is not received by any of the recipient then the Mobile Agent Server will locate the address from the MA Client and establish connectivity again and then forwards the message.

Using asymmetric keys in a certified trust model for multiagent systems

We present a contribution based on encryption to the model for the certification of trust in multiagent systems. The originality of the proposal remains in the use of asymmetric keys that allow the local storage of testimonies with the service agents that were assessed. The aim is to raise the level of efficiency that client agents have when contracting specialized service agents. To reach this objective we make three hypotheses: (i) client agents are able to measure and inform the quality of a service they receive from a service agent; (ii) distributed certificate control is possible if every service agent stores the certificates it receives from its client agents and, (iii) the content of a certificate can be considered safe as long as the public and private keys used to encrypt the certificate remain safe. This approach reduces some weak points of trust models that rely on the direct interaction between service and client agents (direct trust) or those that rely on testimony obtained from client agents (propagated trust). Simulation showed that encrypted certificates of trust improved the efficiency of client agents when choosing their service provider agents. The reason seems to be that the reputation of a given service provider agent is based on the reputation it has among the totality of client agents that used its services.

웹 서비스 동적 연동을 위한 클라이언트 에이전트 프레임워크

In order to connect web services, clients generally should use heavy frameworks such as .Net framework and Java run-time environment, which require high performance hardware resources like a personal computer. Therefore, it is impossible for sensor nodes to handle web services due to their limited resources. In this paper, a client agent framework is proposed for dynamically connecting web services in the client node with limited resources. A client agent, which is managed by the framework in other server, has full capability for connecting web services, while a real client has a simple connection module with the client agent. In this framework, a client agent is dynamically generated using the WSDL in the web service server. By using the framework, sensor nodes or mobile devices can enhance their functionalities and services by accessing web services with minimum resources.

MASHA: A multi-agent system handling user and device adaptivity of Web sites

A user that navigates on the Web using different devices should be characterized by a global profile, which represents his behaviour when using all these devices. Then, the user's profile could be usefully exploited when interacting with a site agent that is able to provide useful recommendations on the basis of the user's interests, on one hand, and to adapt the site presentation to the device currently exploited by the user, on the other hand. However, it is not suitable to construct such a global profile by a software running on the exploited device since this device (e.g., a mobile phone or a palmtop) may have limited resources. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a multi-agent architecture, called MASHA, handling user and device adaptivity of Web sites, in which each device is provided with a client agent that autonomously collects information about the user's behaviour associated to just that device. However, the user profile contained in this client is continuously updated with information coming from a unique server agent, associated with the user. Such information is collected by the server agent from the different devices exploited by the user, and represents a global user profile. The third component of this architecture, called adapter agent, is capable to generate a personalized representation of the Web site, containing some useful recommendations derived by both an analysis of the user profile and the suggestions coming from other users exploiting the same device.