Permission and Authorization in Policies for Virtual Communities of Agents

Abstract

Abstract. We study the design of policies for virtual communities of agents based on peer-to-peer systems or the grid infrastructure. In a virtual community agents can play both the role of resource consumers and the role of resource providers. Moreover, the agents remain in control of their resources, and therefore we distinguish between the authorization to access a resource given by the virtual community and the permission to do so issued by the resource providers. We propose a logical multiagent framework for virtual communities that distinguishes three roles: resource consumption, provision, as well as authorization.

Nonmonotonic Trust Management for P2P Applications

“…However, the policy of a virtual community may have a distributed character and can be seen as a product of the policies of the community members. Boella and van der Torre [3] take the same direction and emphasise the distinction between authorisations given by the Community Authorisation Service and permissions granted by resource providers in virtual communities of agents. They regard authorisation as a means used by community authorities to regulate the access of customers to resources that are not under control of these authorities.…”

Security policies for sharing knowledge in virtual communities

“…Finally, the current framework can be extended to deal not only with policies consisting of regulative rules like obligations, prohibitions, and permissions, but also with constitutive rules specifying counts-as relations and institutional facts [39]. In particular, in [38], we use countsas relations to specify local policies concerning authorizations, while global policies prescribing constitutive rules are still an open issue.…”

“…In particular, in [38], we explore the problem of how local providers can delegate to other agents the power to authorize access without giving up their autonomy. We argue that the problem can be solved by means of counts-as relations [39]: An agent empowered to authorize can issue declarations that are considered as authorizations by the local provider.…”

A survey of security issue in multi-agent systems

“…The policies can specify the authorized actions considering the current state of roles and conditions, while determining the next state. Boella and van der Torre (2004) distinguish between authorization and permission in a community policy. In their work, a community is a distributed MAS operating in a P2P environment.…”