A Fast Data Protection Technique for Mobile Agents to Avoid Attacks in Malicious Hosts

Mobile agents have been considered a promising technology to develop e-commerce applications, however the security concerns about the technology have stopped its widespread use. The identified security areas comprise protecting hosts against malicious agents, protecting the agent’s transmission and protecting agents against malicious hosts. The first two security issues and the protection of the code state of the agent can be solved by applying traditional security techniques. Even though there are some works that manage the data state protection, its implementation is almost unfeasible in terms of performance and complexity. This paper describes a fast and easy to implement algorithm that a mobile agent can use to encrypt its data during its itinerary. The algorithm only makes use of a bitmap and XOR operations. The algorithm consist of applying XOR operations to the data to be ciphered and a random bitmap, while the map is repeatedly shifted to the right or to the left in order to compute a CRC field for validation against malicious tampering. The method only uses basic bit operations so that its implementation is very easy to develop. Besides, since it does not use any computationally expensive cryptographic technique (i.e. digital signatures) it is very fast. In this way we manage to have a secure, simple, fast and feasible protection algorithm to protect data while mobile agents are roaming, where simplicity and performance are its better advantages. c ©2001 Published by Elsevier Science B. V.