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Infrastructure for forensic analysis
of multi-agent systems
Emilio Serrano and Juan Botía
emilioserra@um.es, juanbot@um.es
University of Murcia

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Points
 Introduction
 Global snapshots generation
 Global snapshots generation (II)
 Storing and ordering
 Selection of subset of messages
 Message order induced by logical clocks
 Message order induced by logical clocks (II)
 Valid orders for classic representations
 Conclusions and future work

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Introduction
 Forensic analysis of runs in multi agents systems (MAS)
developments.
 Forensic analysis: software projects management, distributed systems
analysis, security…
 MAS software:
 Finding anomalies or undesired behaviour.
 Steps:
1. To include logical clocks inside messages
2. To capture messages and log them
3. To select an interesting set of messages
4. To order them
5. To analyze them

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Global snapshots generation
 A general infrastructure, how?
 Aspect oriented programming (AOP)
 Languages: AspectJ, AspectC, AspectC++,
Aspect C#...
 With: Java platform + [ACLMessage class used
by methods send() and receive()], as Jade, we
could write these pointcuts and advices in
AspectJ:

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Global snapshots generation (II)
 Pointcuts (pick out join points)
 Advices (behaviour, pointcut + body of code)
 Genericity?

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Storing and ordering
 A storage mechanism that all agents can
access -> RDB
 Order events from a distributed system ->
Vector Clocks
 Array of integers (one for every agent)
 Every agent stores a maximum clock
 and includes it when sends a message
 and modifies it before sending or after receiving a
message
 Order operations = Order events
Where do it?
Mobility works?
Disadvantages?

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 We have stored every message, we need
select a subset
 Messages of selected Agents (Ac)
 Progressive analysis (Ac, depth)
Selection of subset of messages

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Message order induced by logical clocks
 Vector clocks induce a binary partial order:
 Simple example:

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Message order induced by
logical clocks (II)

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Valid orders for classic
representations
 Vector clocks induce a binary
partial order… but we usually
work with total orders.
 There is a total order which
contains a partial order
 Topological sorting
 Does it lose information?

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Conclusions and future work
 Framework to: capture, order and represent messages exchanged in a
run of a MAS software.
 First phase to postmortem analysis.
 All implemented in ACLAnalyser
 http://aclanalyser.sourceforge.net
 Future work:
 To implement this framework in multiple platforms
 To capture other interesting events
 To improve the expressivity of the order graph
 Causality graphs
 Abstract graphs
 Automatic methods for debugging, validation and verification of MAS
 Extending Ingenias (http://ingenias.sourceforge.net)

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THAK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION!