Malicious Host and Problem of Blocking for Mobile Agent: Proposed Solution

Mobile Agent (MA) is a software programs that lives in computer networks, performing its computations and moving from host to host as necessary to fulfil user goals. Autonomous behaviour of MA and the malicious environment of the internet give rise to various important security issues related with both MA and its host. Various researchers working in the areas have identified various threats and their effects. During its life cycle a MA moves from one host to other. If MA is malicious or if the executing environment i.e. host is malicious they both can influence each other and can harm in many ways. If the MA wishes to visit a host which has been detected as malicious then it should not migrate to that host. In this case MA will be blocked at its current location. This paper discusses the problem of blocking for MA for malicious host and proposes a group based layered architecture to mask the malicious host from rest of the network. Proposed architecture is centralized at one level and distributed at other. It divides the open network like internet into regions and hosts in each region are then grouped on the basis of services they offered. One of the host acts as group in-charge. This group appears as a single host to the other parts of the network. In case, a host is found malicious, load of that host is distributed among other trusted group members and recovery procedure for host started.