Title :
Security issues in mobile agent technology
Author :
Corradi, Antonio ; Montanari, Rebecca ; Stefanelli, Cesare
Author_Institution :
Dipt. di Elettronica Inf. e Sistemistica, Bologna Univ., Italy
Abstract :
The Mobile Agent (MA) paradigm seems to be a promising technology for developing applications in open, distributed and heterogeneous environments, such us the Internet. Many application areas, such as electronic commerce, mobile computing, network management and information retrieval can benefit from the application of the MA technology. The exploitation of mobile agents offer several peculiar advantages, such us reduction of network latency, asynchronous execution, robust and fault tolerant behavior. However, a wider diffusion of MA is currently limited by the lack of a comprehensive security framework that can address the security concerns arising in mobile agent applications providing efficiency at the same time. This paper describes an MA environment, called Secure and Open Mobile Agent (SOMA), that offers a wide range of security tools and mechanisms aimed at protecting both execution sites and agents against reciprocal malicious behavior. In particular, SOMA integrates several possible solutions to ensure agent integrity. The paper presents an electronic marketplace prototype based on SOMA where we have validated the efficiency and scalability of our security framework
Keywords :
Internet; distributed processing; electronic commerce; information retrieval; mobile computing; security of data; Internet; asynchronous execution; electronic commerce; heterogeneous environments; information retrieval; mobile agent technology; mobile computing; network latency; network management; scalability; security framework; security issues; security tools; Computer network management; Computer networks; Electronic commerce; Information management; Information retrieval; Information security; Internet; Mobile agents; Mobile computing; Technology management;
Conference_Titel :
Distributed Computing Systems, 1999. Proceedings. 7th IEEE Workshop on Future Trends of
Conference_Location :
Cape Town
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-0468-X
DOI :
10.1109/FTDCS.1999.818777