Detecting Intrusions in Agent System by Means of Exception Handling

We present a formal approach to conception of a dedicated security infrastructure based on the exception handling in the protected agents. Securityrelated exceptions are identified and handled by a dedicated reflective layer of the protected agent, or delegated to specialized intrusion management agents in the system if the local reflective layer fails to address the problem. Incidents are handled either directly, if a known remedy exists or indirectly, when an appropriate solution must be identified before response execution. The cooperation between the intrusion management agents and aggregation of their observations can make the system more resilient to misclassification than a solution based purely on signature matching.