A Security Architecture for Protecting Dynamic Components of Mobile Agents

New techniques, languages and paradigms have facilitated the creation of distributed applications in several areas. Perhaps the most promising paradigm is the one that incorporates the mobile agent concept. A mobile agent in a largescale network can be viewed as a software program that travels through a heterogeneous network, crossing various security domains and executing autonomously in its destination. Mobile agent technology extends the traditional network communication model by including mobile processes, which can autonomously migrate to new remote servers. This basic idea results in numerous benefits including flexible, dynamic customisation of the behavior of clients and servers and robust interaction over unreliable networks. In spite of its advantages, widespread adoption of the mobile agent paradigm is being delayed due to various security concerns. Currently available mechanisms for reducing the security risks of this technology do not efficiently cover all the existing threats. Due to the characteristics of the mobile agent paradigm and the threats to which it is exposed, security mechanisms must be designed to protect both agent hosting servers and agents. Protection to agent-hosting servers’ security is a reasonably well researched issue, and many viable mechanisms have been developed to address it. Protecting agents is technically more challenging and solutions to do so are far less developed. The primary added complication is that, as an agent traverses multiple servers that are trusted to different degrees, the agent’s owner has no control over the behaviors of the agent-hosting servers. Consequently the hosting servers can subvert the computation of the passing agent. Since it is infeasible to enforce the remote servers to enact the security policy that may prevent the server from corrupting agent’s data, cryptographic mechanisms defined by the agent’s owner may be one of the feasible solutions to protect agent’s data.