SAPA: Software Agents for Prevention and Auditing of Security Faults in Networked Systems

摘要

This paper describes the design and implementation of a multi-agent system to detect and audit host security vulnerabilities. The system uses agent platforms allocated through the network to scan and interact-with each host. The information collected by each agent is then used to build a common knowledge base that together with data retrieved from vulnerabilities information sources is used to improve the overall security. This approach reduces the total time to scan the network and the processing time overhead associated. The amount of traffic involved is also reduced. It allows the dissemination of updated knowledge about the network security status and reduces the communication with the network administrator. This solution provides an autonomous and proactive distributed system. It acts as a vulnerability assessment tool to make security notifications only if needed.