Apoptosis - the Programmed Death of Distributed Services

Active networks enable to deploy new services at run–time by using mobile code. While considerable effort is under way to build active network infrastructures and to understand how to create corresponding services, less is known about how to end them. A particular problem is the coordinated steering of mobile code based services, especially in the case of “strong” active networks where each data packet is replaced by a mobile program and where a distributed service can consists of a myriad of anonymous active packets. In this paper we introduce the concept of apoptosis for mobile code based services. This term is borrowed from cell biology and designates the programmed cell death. We discuss the need for a self–destruction mechanism inside a distributed mobile service and address the problem of securing such a mechanism against malicious activation, for which a simple solution is shown.