A novel method for authenticating mobile agents with one-way signature chaining

Author

Saxena, Amitabh ; Soh, Ben

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Comput. Eng., La Trobe Univ., Bundoora, Australia

fYear

2005

fDate

4-8 April 2005

Firstpage

187

Lastpage

193

Abstract

Mobile agents are mobile programs capable of maintaining their execution states as they migrate between different execution platforms. A key security problem in such systems is how to trust the code coming from a remote platform before it can be executed. In this paper, we set a formal model for mobile agent security based on cryptographic primitives and describe a protocol that enables trust relationships to be formed between agent platforms in an ad-hoc manner. This protocol can be used to authenticate agents before granting execution privileges. The main idea behind our approach is the concept of ´additive´ zero-know ledge which we demonstrate using non-commutative associative one-way functions.

Keywords

cryptography; message authentication; mobile agents; associative one-way functions; authentication; cryptographic primitives; key security problem; mobile agent security; noninteractive zero knowledge; one-way signature chaining; Authentication; Computer science; Cryptographic protocols; Identity-based encryption; Information security; Maintenance engineering; Mobile agents; Mobile computing; Network servers; Protection;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Autonomous Decentralized Systems, 2005. ISADS 2005. Proceedings

Print_ISBN

0-7803-8963-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ISADS.2005.1452050

Filename

1452050