An RBAC Approach for Securing Access Control in a MAS Coordination Infrastructure

Access control is a main security issue in the management of complex information systems as well as Multi-agent Systems (MAS). In this paper we discuss the application of the Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model in the context of TuCSoN coordination infrastructure for MAS. RBAC models and their extensions are currently considered the most effective approach for engineering access control in complex information systems and dynamic organisations. In this work we discuss how an RBAC-like approach is realised in TuCSoN by means of the Agent Coordination Context (ACC) notion, bringing together security as well as organisation issues; an ACC acts like an organisation abstraction released by the MAS infrastructure, defining the runtime context of an agent in terms of its actions/perceptions, and according to the roles it is playing inside an organisation.