Agent Protection Based on the Use of Cryptographic Hardware

Mobile agents are processes that can migrate autonomously from new hosts. Despite of the huge number of fields of application of this technology, a lack in the security exists. The main approach of this work is based on the provision of a secure execution environment for mobile agents. Our approach is based on the idea of the trusted migration. This trusted migration is reached by means of the use of cryptographic hardware. Concretely, trusted computing module (TPM). Thus, we have designed and developed a specific protocol, which is the basis to build the solution. In order to build our solution on a robust basis, we have validated this protocol by means of a model checking tool called AVISPA. Finally, we built a library to provide access to TPM (trusted platform module) functionalities. The idea behind of this is based on the easy in using cryptographic hardware in the agent based systems development, disposing to agent developers of the security related tasks of their systems. The most relevant aspects of this library are described along this paper both at development stage of it and while we use it to develop a system based agent.