Enhancing Mobile Agent Applications with Security and Fault Tolerant Capabilities

Mobile agent technology promises to be a powerful mechanism to improve the flexibility and customizability of applications with its ability to dynamically deploy application components across the network. But none of the present mobile agent prototype systems satisfy all the requirements to provide a secure and reliable architecture, suitable for any mobile agent based distributed application. This paper presents architecture for a mobile agent system to provide a reliable agent tracking mechanism from the perspective of the owner of the agent, protection for the host from a malicious agent and the agent from the malicious host when an agent migrates to different nodes with an assigned task. This framework uses various encryption mechanisms to provide the required host security and agent security.