Personal Security Agent: KQML-Based PKI

Abstract

Certificate management infrastructure, a.k.a. PKI (Public Key Infrastructure), which issues and provides access to public key certificates to preserve the integrity of a public key, is fundamental for electronic commerce and business across the Internet. To satisfy the requirements of various applications, PKI should demonstrate customization to user needs, interoperability and flexibility in its implementations so it can satisfy the needs of various applications. Particularly, due to the popularity of software agent-based applications over the Internet, security will be urgently needed by the "agent society". We propose to implement the authority of authentication verification service systems as personal autonomous software agents, called security agents. In this paper, we present two aspects of KQML-based PKI: 1. the security agent concept and its functional modules; 2. an extension of KQML, which is needed for public key management and secure communications among security agents and application agents.