The role of Trusted Computing in secure agent migration

Software agents are a promising computing paradigm. Scientific community has devoted important efforts to this field [1]. Indeed, several important applications exist based on this technology. Despite of their benefits, the lack of the appropriate security mechanisms for agent based systems represents a barrier for the widespread use of this technology. Additionally, the application of the current security techniques is not trivial for agent based system developers, which are usually not security experts. This paper presents a hardware based protection infrastructure that takes advantage of the recent advances in trusted hardware in order to solve the problem known as the malicious host in mobile agent systems. This infrastructure is composed of extensions to the JADE framework and the Trusted Computing technology. Additionally, the protocol used in this implementation has been validated using the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) as we described in the paper.