Mobile agent security in multi agent environments using a multi agent-multi key approach

We consider the problem of keeping sensitive data and algorithms contained in a mobile agent from discovery and exploitation by a malicious host. The paper illustrates a novel distributed protocol for multi agent environments to improve the communication security in packet-switched networks. To enrich the overall system security the approach makes use of distribution and double encryption and some other traditional methods such as digital signature. In this approach the encrypted private key and the message are broken into different parts carrying by different agents which makes it difficult for malicious entities to mine the private key for message encryption, while the private key for the encrypted key is allocated on the predetermined destination nodes. On the other hand, all of the previously proposed encryption algorithms can be applied in the proposed approach that deteriorates the key discovery process. To improve the overall security, the paper makes use of advanced encryption standard (AES) as the encryption base for message encryption. The paper also presents some evaluation discussions presenting time overhead analysis and crack probability.