Study of MA protection technology of extending inheritance hierarchy trees in IDC network management

Mobile agents (MA) are autonomous software entities that are able to migrate across heterogeneous network execution environments. Mobility and autonomy compensate the deficiencies of distributed technology pretty well. Thus, mobile agents have wide application prospects. But the security issues with mobile agents have not been solved and are becoming obstacles for the application of mobile agents. Compared with host protection, the research on mobile agent protection is still at the beginning stage. Obfuscation is a technique in which the mobile code producer enforces the security policy by applying a behavior transformation to the code before sending it to run on different platforms. This paper presents a protection scheme of mobile agent in network management application, which combining method of extending inheritance hierarchy tree and time checking technology to protect the security of MA. The protection scheme is tested in actual network management environment, which can effectively identify the malicious host.