TrustMAS: Trusted Communication Platform for Multi-Agent Systems

TL;DR

TrustMAS is a platform that ensures trust and anonymity for mobile agents, utilizing steganography and distributed steganographic routing to enable secure, hidden communication across multi-agent systems.

Contribution

The paper introduces TrustMAS, a novel platform combining trust, anonymity, and steganography for secure multi-agent communication with a distributed steganographic routing mechanism.

Findings

Successful implementation of anonymous communication using random-walk algorithms.

Effective use of steganography across TCP/IP layers for hidden routing.

Formation of a distributed steganographic router (Stegrouter) among agents.

Abstract

The paper presents TrustMAS - Trusted Communication Platform for Multi-Agent Systems, which provides trust and anonymity for mobile agents. The platform includes anonymous technique based on random-walk algorithm for providing general purpose anonymous communication for agents. All agents, which take part in the proposed platform, benefit from trust and anonymity that is provided for their interactions. Moreover, in TrustMAS there are StegAgents (SA) that are able to perform various steganographic communication. To achieve that goal, SAs may use methods in different layers of TCP/IP model or specialized middleware enabling steganography that allows hidden communication through all layers of mentioned model. In TrustMAS steganographic channels are used to exchange routing tables between StegAgents. Thus all StegAgents in TrustMAS with their ability to exchange information by using hidden channels form distributed steganographic router (Stegrouter).