{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,26]],"date-time":"2026-02-26T06:34:57Z","timestamp":1772087697345,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":26,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"2","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,19]],"date-time":"2026-02-19T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1771459200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100006393","name":"University of Granada","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100006393","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"crossref"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Information"],"abstract":"<jats:p>This paper presents a novel architecture for creating light agents embedded on Internet of Things (IoT) devices, specifically addressing challenges such as security, scalability, and adaptability. Despite the increasing adoption of agent-based approaches in IoT systems, security and robustness mechanisms are often treated as external or ad hoc components in many existing solutions. This limits their effectiveness in dynamic environments that transmit sensitive and personal data and are, by nature, potentially untrusted. The proposed architecture applies Pyro4 for efficient communication among agents and implements a multi-level security scheme that combines symmetric, asymmetric, and hybrid encryption with Time-Based One-Time Passwords (TOTP)-based authentication. This ensures the data confidentiality and integrity within dynamic IoT environments. A case study validates the \u201cagent of things\u201d concept by confirming key security mechanisms such as agent authentication, multi-factor access control, secure communication, and fault resilience. Qualitative testing proved the architecture effective in mitigating common vulnerabilities in distributed agent environments, achieving high reliability scores in terms of security and performance. Experimental results show that over 75% of agent operations were completed in under 2 milliseconds, with a success rate above 99%, confirming the architecture\u2019s lightweight execution and real-time readiness of the architecture for IoT environments. Therefore, the proposed architecture is particularly useful for researchers and practitioners working on secure IoT systems, embedded multi-agent architectures, and intelligent edge computing environments.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/info17020213","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,19]],"date-time":"2026-02-19T11:44:27Z","timestamp":1771501467000},"page":"213","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["LightGuardAgents: Secure and Robust Embedded Agents for Internet of Things Devices"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"17","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-2832-8625","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jos\u00e9","family":"Caicedo-Ortiz","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science and Electronics, University of La Costa, Barranquilla 080002, Colombia"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-8031-1276","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Juan A.","family":"Holgado-Terriza","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Software Engineering Department, Research Centre for Information and Communication Technologies (CITIC-UGR), University of Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3518-3313","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Pablo","family":"Pico-Valencia","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Software Engineering Department, Research Centre for Information and Communication Technologies (CITIC-UGR), University of Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Deiber","family":"Olivares-Olivares","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science and Electronics, University of La Costa, Barranquilla 080002, Colombia"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,19]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","first-page":"1550147718805945","article-title":"Agentification of the Internet of Things: A Systematic Literature Review","volume":"14","year":"2018","journal-title":"Int. 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