Enhancing Mobile Agents with Electronic Commerce Capabilities

The paradigm of mobile agents offers a powerful and flexible opportunity to develop distributed applications on a high-level of abstraction. One of the most interesting tasks for mobile agents is an active search for relevant information in non-local domains on behalf of their users. A mobile agent will be sent out on behalf of an user to various host servers in the Internet and to find information. In the future this information might not be freely accessible, so the agent may have to pay for them. Thus the mobile agent has to be equipped with electronic commerce capabilities. This implies a fault tolerant and secure infrastructure for the mobile agent. In this paper we present a system which offers electronic commerce capabilities for mobile agents. These capabilities a part of an architecture which guarantees different security issues and fault tolerance for mobile agents. Security for the partners involved is handled by encryption methods based on a public key authentication mechanism and by secret key encryption of the communication. To achieve fault tolerance for the agent system, especially for the agent transfer to a new host, we use Distributed Transaction Processing (DTP). This architecture can be used on top of existing mobile agent systems, e.g. as an enhancement of the “GOStatement“, and offers a high reliability because the implementation is based on standardized components.