An Id-based Access Control in a Hierarchical Key Management for Mobile Agent

The related techniques and applications on e-commerce have been concerned by a great number of researchers. The use of a mobile agent, in particular, is an important breakthrough on the e-commerce applications. With the abilities of higher autonomy and mobility, a mobile agent can move freely among different execution environments, can automatically detect its resided environment, and can react itself accordingly. Besides, a mobile agent itself can complete the tasks assigned by the users. Because of these characteristics, a mobile agent becomes the most suitable application for e-commerce. However, it is always a risk to transfer confidential information over an open Internet environment. When a mobile agent roams itself among the servers over Internet or the mobile agents exchange information with each other, the users would concern whether the mobile agent was attacked by some manipulated servers or the carried confidential information is stolen or tampered by the others. All these worries make the safety of a mobile agent on the Internet be an important issue. Thus, this paper will propose a suitable and secure scheme for the mobile agent. The scheme, based on the bilinear pairing over elliptic curves, takes the concept of identity-based access control on a hierarchical key management. This paper also aims to increase improvements on the scheme presented by Volker and Mehrdad to resolve the problem of storage waste in their scheme because of storing the overlapping decryption keys of a mobile agent. From the results of the security and performance analysis in this paper, the proposed scheme is proven to protect the mobile agent in an efficient and secure way.