Modelling secure multiagent systems

Abstract

Security plays an important role in the development of multiagent systems. However, a careful analysis of software development processes shows that the definition of security requirements is, usually, considered after the design of the system. This is, mainly, due to the fact that agent oriented software engineering methodologies have not integrated security concerns throughout their developing stages. The integration of security concerns during the whole range of the development stages could help towards the development of more secure multiagent systems. In this paper we introduce extensions to the Tropos methodology to enable it to model security concerns throughout the whole development process. A description of the new concepts is given along with an explanation of how these concepts are integrated to the current stages of Tropos. An example from the health care sector is used to illustrate the above.