Negotiation of network security policy by means of agents

Abstract

Nowadays many intranets are deployed without enforcing any network security policy and just relying on security technologies such as firewalls or antivirus. In addition, the number and type of network entities are no longer fixed. Typically, laptops, PDAs or mobile phones need to have access to network resources occasionally. Therefore, it is important to design flexible systems that allow an easy administration of connectivity without compromising security. This article shows how software agents may provide secure configurations to a computer network in a distributed, autonomous and dynamic manner. Thus, here we describe the system architecture of a prototype, the negotiation protocol it uses and how it works in a sample scenario.