A review of attacks and security approaches in open multi-agent systems

Open multi-agent systems (MASs) have growing popularity in the Multi-agent Systems community and are predicted to have many applications in future, as large scale distributed systems become more widespread. A major practical limitation to open MASs is security because the openness of such systems negates many traditional security solutions. In this paper we introduce and classify main attacks on open MASs. We then survey and analyse various security techniques in the literature and categorise them under prevention and detection approaches. Finally, we suggest which security technique is an appropriate countermeasure for which classes of attack.