The information in an enterprise is distributed.
A centric search engine does not satisfy the security requirement
in enterprise information retrieval.
In this paper, amulti-agent based distributed secure information
retrieval approach has been presented.
In this approach,a department or a unit in an enterprise has a search agent, so, the department can keep their information privatelyand securely.
A role based access control strategy is adapted for global security for an enterprise.
We have developed a prototype system by this approach.