An Approach for Mobile Agent Security and Fault Tolerance using Distributed Transactions

Mobile agents are no longer a theoretical issue since different architectures for their realization have been proposed. With the increasing market of electronic commerce it becomes an interesting aspect to use autonomous mobile agents for electronic business transactions. Being involved in money transactions, supplementary security features for mobile agent systems have to be ensured. In this paper we present an architecture for a mobile agent system which guarantees security for the host as well as security for the agent. This architecture additionally offers fault tolerance for the whole agent system at a high level. To handle these issues for mobile agents we use various encryption mechanisms and we apply a novel method for mobile agent systems by using distributed transactions processing based on the OMG Object Transaction Service in our architecture. With this security architecture an agent will be enabled to do money transactions.