الفهرس 
DATA COMMUNICATION SECURITYOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Data communication and information technologies have been one of the
ever-growing areas of research and development in the past few years. The
Internet has caused greater reliance on computers as a primary source of
information, data processing and decision-making. Electronic commerce is
changing the way people used to trade and turning the Internet into a
marketplace. Security is strongly attached to information technology.
Security policies are required to limit access to electronic information
resources published on the World Wide Web based on the desires of the
publisher. Electronic commerce is based on trust between parties involved
in a trade. Security mechanisms increase the capability of trust between
parties. Hence, security is one of the fundamental attributes of electronic
commerce. Intelligent software agents are autonomous computational
entities that can pursue goals and carry out tasks in order to meet their
design objectives with little or no human intervention. Multi-agent systems
(MAS) are systems that have more than one agent, which are capable of
communicating and cooperating with each other to solve a problem. Agentbased
systems allow efficient utilization of resources and amortize
communication delay in a distributed system. Agents are widely used in
open network like the Internet, on behalf of their owners, to search for
information and negotiate in electronic commerce. Agents face some trust
and security issues when deployed in open network. In this thesis, we
propose Agent-based Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which would use the
intelligence and autonomy of agents in solving the compatibility problems
of different kinds of traditional Public Key Infrastructure. Our design is to
use software agents as authentication verification service authority. These
agents are called security agents whose security is based on public key
cryptography technology. We will also introduce the aspects and
architecture of agent-based security system. These aspects are agent
authentication mechanism, security architecture within an agent, and
security extension of the agents’ communication language to support
secure communication between agents and public key management. This
security infrastructure would increase the capability of trust between
agents.