Security Mechanisms for using Mobile Agents in Electronic Commerce

In order for mobile agents to be accepted as a basic technology for enabling electronic commerce, proper security mechanisms must be developed. Hosts must be protected from malicious agents, agents must be protected from other agents and also agents must be protected from malicious hosts. For solving the first three problems, existing technology from operating systems and distributed systems research can be used. The last problem is new and specific to the mobile agent paradigm and it is much harder to solve. Due to this problem, many say that mobile agents are not ready for the e-commerce systems. In this paper we discuss the security requirements of mobile agents in the context of electronic commerce and analyze how these requirements can be met. We show that, because of the characteristics of e-commerce systems, the security requirements of the agents and their users can be assured in real and open environments as the Internet.