POM-a mobile agent security model against malicious hosts

Security, especially attacks performed by hosts on visiting mobile agents (the malicious hosts problem), is a major obstacle that prevents mobile agent technology from being widely adopted. Being the running environment for mobile agents, the host has full control over them and could easily perform many kinds of attacks against them. This problem has not been fully solved yet. After the analysis of mobile agent security requirements, this paper first gives some design issues of a practical security model of the malicious hosts problem. Based on this, POM (Police Office Model), a mobile agent security model, is presented. By setting up special hosts called police offices within regions, POM can prevent most attacks performed by malicious hosts through the separation of the safety-critical parts of mobile agents from the malicious hosts.