Comparative Analysis of Detection and Prevention Security Techniques in Mobile Agents System

Mobile agent system is a distributed computing environment that is perceived as a flexible alternative to client server technology. Mobile agents can travel autonomously through a computer network in order to perform some computation or gather information on behalf of a human user or an application. This helps in reducing network traffic to a large extent. However, it has not become popular due to some problems such as security, fault tolerance etc. The fact that computers have complete control over all the programs makes it very hard to protect mobile agents from untrusted hosts. There is not a single, comprehensive solution that provides complete protection of agents against malicious hosts. Existing solutions either only detect or to some extent prevent attacks on agents. This paper surveys various malicious host problems, techniques for keeping mobile agent secure against malicious host and comparative analysis of techniques is done based on certain parameters like agent’s code, agent’s result, integrity and authentication etc.