Abstract:
Agents are independent pieces of software capable of
acting autonomously in response to input from their
environment. A multi-agent system is a system
composed of numerous agents. Besides, it can be used
to solve problems which are difficult for an individual
agent to solve. With the growth of Internet and
distributed computing, more and more web applications
employed agent based applications. Security is an
important issue for the widespread development of
application based on software agent. When users were
simply accessing information on a network, simple
passwords were usually sufficient to protect
information. However, the increasingly distributed
computing environment are often operated by multiple
parties and password-cracking programs are available
that can break typical passwords in a short period of
time. Consequently, the need for stronger levels of
authentication has become critical. This paper
describes agents that used Keyed-Hash Message
Authentication Code (HMAC) to authenticate valid user
to ensure proper access and control of the web based
online examination agent.