The Secure Wireless Agent Testbed (SWAT) is a unique facility developed at Drexel University in collaboration with Sarnoff Corporation to study integration, networking and information assurance for next-generation wireless mobile agent systems. It is the only known implemented system fully integrating: mobile agents, MANETs, and security. The authors believe that SWAT is the largest known multi-agent system living on a MANET (802.11b wireless network with ad hoc routing), consisting of dozens of mobile hosts (PDAs, laptops) and thousands of static and mobile software agents. Novel mechanisms have been developed for SWAT integrating autonomous agent technologies with public-key and symmetric key encryption to support secure communication, at multiple OSI layers, among groups of hosts and agents.

SWAT Security is monitored by agents that manage keys, assess network traffic patterns and analyze host behaviors. Agents can use machine learning to develop profiles for nominal agent, hardware platform and network states. Given learned profiles, detection agents identify specific problems in SWAT, including over-runs/capture, and malicious insiders. Other agents monitor the health of the network and the devices in the network, looking for network attacks and security breaches. Using this framework, agents can revoke access rights for suspicious hosts or agents and adaptively re-route traffic at the network layer to improve the information integrity of the overall system. Agents also provide the implementation framework for decentralized user applications, including those for authentication, collaboration, messaging, and remote sensor monitoring.