Security in Agent Systems1.6 Information to Strangers"Mr. Chess is busy browsing alt.sex right now; can I take a message?" Sophisticated intelligent agents can form models of the people and organizations that they serve. These models are useful to guide the operation of the agent; but some aspects of the model may include facts that should not be revealed to outsiders. My secretary-agent may know that I am unavailable because I am in an urgent meeting with Rob and Maureen about a deadline we're about to miss. Will it be smart enough to know that it can tell callers that I am in a meeting, but that the subject of the meeting must not be mentioned? If it has learned that every Thursday at this time I am unavailable, and in an emergency I can be contacted at the Fair Hills Golf Course, will it know exactly who it can reveal which parts of that knowledge to? To the extent that I have explicitly told the agent these things, I can also tell it how closely to guard them. But to the extent that it has figured them out itself, it will also have to figure out the confidentiality itself, and programs are generally not very good at that sort of task. Agents may also reveal secret information by the patterns of queries they send out, the bids they solicit, or the goods they purchase. People can and do make this same sort of mistake, of course, but we can expect agent programs to do it even more often, and some clever design work will be required to avoid it.[ Top of Page | Previous Page | Next Page | Table of Contents ] |