An Enhanced Approach for Securing Mobile Agents from the Attack of Other Malicious Mobile Agents

The area of mobile agent security is in a state of immaturity, but rapidly improving. Emphasis is beginning to move toward developing techniques that are oriented towards protecting the agent. Agent technology has been used in many critical applications like business process management, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, distributed processing etc. The mobile agent technology has encountered many security threats during the itinerary period .The security schemes presented in this paper for mobile agent address the code, data and itinerary security issues. An environment that protects the legitimate mobile agent from the malicious mobile agent is provided. A checksum method is used to detect a malicious mobile agent which is appending to a legitimate mobile agent. The confidentiality of the data that are retrieved from each remote server is ensured by encryption mechanisms. The itinerary is also protected by allowing only registered users to create new mobile agents and is controlled by a central co-coordinator. Thus an enhanced security mechanism is presented to protect the mobile agent’s code, data and route.