Policy-Based Trustworthy Software Model

With development of information technology, internet based application emerging. The e-commerce is a typical application in this internet age. But it must face two challenging issues. One is how to make it more convenient for user; the other one is how to make it more security for trade. The use of agent technology and policy measures to solve the above problems has gradually become a main method.As agent technology continues to be one of the most cherished research areas nowadays. In particular, the multi-agent field related research topics and applications have increased dramatically. This is due to the success of intelligent agents which can act on the behalf of a human being. The human involvement will be for monitoring and assigning tasks to agents, which in turn will do other specific operations in a very fast and accurate manner. Software agents are required to provide a strong working structure especially in security as they help build powerful distributed systems.At the same time, policies in modern systems and applications play an essential role. We argue that decisions based on policy rules should take into account the possibility for the users to enable specific policy rules, by performing actions at the time when preconditions are being rendered, and/or by promising to perform other actions in the future. In defining a general-purpose policy-based security framework, security policies for the confidentiality, integrity and availability of services and information need to be considered.In this thesis, a policy-based trustworthy software model (PBTSM) is proposed. In this model, it achieves convenient e-commerce application by agent on behalf of human to act in trade process and ensures the safety and credibility of the process in e-commerce with policy-based control method. We study, analyze and present in detail the possible scenarios which are needed for analyzing, designing and implementing a trustworthy software model which can handle secure ecommerce payment operations. We also implement a lightweight prototype system, where human users (buyers and sellers) are able to delegate their tasks to agents, which will then do the shopping job on their behalf, do payment and then, present them the results. Buyer users (customers) and the seller users (suppliers) can be organizations, companies or individuals. The approach of Policy-based trustworthy software model contributes to find optimal solutions to enhance and facilitate e-commerce payment transactions. And provide the new attempt to solve the security problem in e-commerce domain.