Security mechanism and architecture for collaborative software systems using tuple space

DETAILED DESCRIPTION According to the present invention, a secure agent communications system is provided for operation in conjunction with a Blackboard Messaging System (BMS) such as MicMac.
An overall framework is developed for a general case of multi-agent communication to mutually authenticate parties and establish secure dynamic sessions.
This framework is implementation independent and capable of supporting different authentication and key exchange protocols.
Moreover, the system according to the present invention accommodates both the protection of pure communication data and information used for control purposes (e.
g.
routing, QoS, etc.
) Therefore, in accordance with an aspect of the invention there is provided a virtual network communication system for effecting secure communications between user agents at different sites within said virtual network, comprising at least one Private Tuple Space within each of the sites for effecting intra-site communications between the agents, a Shared Tuple Space for effecting inter-site communications between different sites, and a Coordinator Manager within each of the sites for receiving user initiated communication requests from the Private Tuple Space to communicate between user agents at the different sites, authenticating the requests and in response dynamically creating and managing instances of Coordinators at each of the different sites which embed messages from the user agents in secure tuples and exchange the secure tuples over the Shared Tuple Space.
According to another aspect of the invention there is provided a method of effecting secure virtual network communications between user agents at different sites within said virtual network, comprising the steps of authenticating user initiated requests to communicate between user agents at different sites, generating and forwarding an inner key to each of the user agents at the different sites for encrypting and decrypting messages exchanged there between, and dynamically creating and managing instances of Coordinators at each of the different sites for embedding the messages in secure tuples and exchanging the secure tuples over a Shared Tuple Space between the different sites