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Reliability

The issues of security and authentication have not been addressed properly thus far by the KQML community. No decision has been made on whether they should be handled at the transport protocol level or at the language level. At the language level, new performatives or message parameters can be introduced that allow for encryption of either the content or the whole KQML message. Since KQML speaking agents might be imperfect, there are performatives ( error and sorry) that can be used as responses to messages that an application cannot process or comprehend.