Biblio

In a multiagent system, a (social) norm describes what the agents may expect from each other.  Norms promote autonomy (an agent need not comply with a norm) and heterogeneity (a norm describes interactions at a high level independent of implementation details). Researchers have studied norm emergence through social learning where the agents interact repeatedly in a graph structure.

In contrast, we consider norm emergence in an open system, where membership can change, and where no predetermined graph structure exists.  We propose Silk, a mechanism wherein a generator monitors interactions among member agents and recommends norms to help resolve conflicts.  Each member decides on whether to accept or reject a recommended norm.  Upon exiting the system, a member passes its experience along to incoming members of the same type.  Thus, members develop norms in a hybrid manner to resolve conflicts.

We evaluate Silk via simulation in the traffic domain.  Our results show that social norms promoting conflict resolution emerge in both moderate and selfish societies via our hybrid mechanism.

To interact effectively, agents must enter into commitments. What should an agent do when these commitments conflict? We describe Coco, an approach for reasoning about which specific commitments apply to specific parties in light of general types of commitments, specific circumstances, and dominance relations among specific commitments. Coco adapts answer-set programming to identify a maximalsetofnondominatedcommitments. It provides a modeling language and tool geared to support practical applications.

Firewall policies are notorious for having misconfiguration errors which can defeat its intended purpose of protecting hosts in the network from malicious users. We believe this is because today's firewall policies are mostly monolithic. Inspired by ideas from modular programming and code refactoring, in this work we introduce three kinds of modules: primary, auxiliary, and template, which facilitate the refactoring of a firewall policy into smaller, reusable, comprehensible, and more manageable components. We present algorithms for generating each of the three modules for a given legacy firewall policy. We also develop ModFP, an automated tool for converting legacy firewall policies represented in access control list to their modularized format. With the help of ModFP, when examining several real-world policies with sizes ranging from dozens to hundreds of rules, we were able to identify subtle errors.