Security for agent systems and mobile agents

2011 ◽  
pp. 287-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Borselius
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Paulo Marques

One central problem preventing widespread adoption of mobile agents as a code structuring primitive is that current mainstream middleware implementations do not convey it simply as such. In fact, they force all the development to be centered on mobile agents, which has serious consequences in terms of software structuring and, in fact, technology adoption. This chapter discusses the main limitations of the traditional platform-based approach, proposing an alternative: component-based mobile agent systems. Two case studies are discussed: the JAMES platform, a traditional mobile agent platform specially tailored for network management, and M&M, a component-based system for agent-enabling applications. Finally, a bird’s eye perspective on the last 15 years of mobile agent systems research is presented along with an outlook on the future of the technology. The authors hope that this chapter brings some enlightenment on the pearls and pitfalls surrounding this interesting technology and ways for avoiding them in the future.


2009 ◽  
pp. 3300-3319
Author(s):  
Paulo Marques ◽  
Luís Silva

One central problem preventing widespread adoption of mobile agents as a code structuring primitive is that current mainstream middleware implementations do not convey it simply as such. In fact, they force all the development to be centered on mobile agents, which has serious consequences in terms of software structuring and, in fact, technology adoption. This chapter discusses the main limitations of the traditional platform-based approach, proposing an alternative: component-based mobile agent systems. Two case studies are discussed: the JAMES platform, a traditional mobile agent platform specially tailored for network management, and M&M, a component-based system for agent-enabling applications. Finally, a bird’s eye perspective on the last 15 years of mobile agent systems research is presented along with an outlook on the future of the technology. The authors hope that this chapter brings some enlightenment on the pearls and pitfalls surrounding this interesting technology and ways for avoiding them in the future.


Author(s):  
Yu-Cheng Chou ◽  
David Ko ◽  
Harry H. Cheng

Agent technology is emerging as an important concept for the development of distributed complex systems. A number of mobile agent systems have been developed in the last decade. However, most of them were developed to support only Java mobile agents. Furthermore, many of them are standalone platforms. In other words, they were not designed to be embedded in a user application to support the code mobility. In order to provide distributed applications with the code mobility, this article presents a mobile agent library, the Mobile-C library. The Mobile-C library is supported by various operating systems including Windows, Unix, and real-time operating systems. It has a small footprint to meet the stringent memory capacity for a variety of mechatronic and embedded systems. This library allows a Mobile-C agency, a mobile agent platform, to be embedded in a program to support C/C++ mobile agents. Functions in this library facilitate the development of a multi-agent system that can easily interface with a variety of hardware devices.


Author(s):  
Stefan Bosse

Ubiquitous computing and The Internet-of-Things (IoT) grow rapidly in today's life and evolving to Self-organizing systems (SoS). A unified and scalable information processing and communication methodology is required. In this work, mobile agents are used to merge the IoT with Mobile and Cloud environments seamless. A portable and scalable Agent Processing Platform (APP) provides an enabling technology that is central for the deployment of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in strong heterogeneous networks including the Internet. A large-scale use-case deploying Multi-agent systems in a distributed heterogeneous seismic sensor and geodetic network is used to demonstrate the suitability of the MAS and platform approach. The MAS is used for earthquake monitoring based on a new incremental distributed learning algorithm applied to seismic station data, which can be extended by ubiquitous sensing devices like smart phones. Different (mobile) agents perform sensor sensing, aggregation, local learning and prediction, global voting and decision making, and the application.


Author(s):  
Najmus Saqib Malik ◽  
David Ko ◽  
Harry H. Cheng

This paper describes a secure migration process of mobile agents between agencies. Mobile-C is an IEEE Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) standard compliant multi-agent platform for supporting C/C++ mobile and stationary agents. This secure migration process is inspired from Secure Shell (SSH). Before migration, both agencies authenticate each other using public key authentication. After successful authentication, an encrypted mobile agent is transferred and its integrity is verified. Mobile-C is specially designed for mechatronic and factory automation systems where, for correct system operations, agencies must accept mobile agents from trusted agencies. For this reason, the emphasis is on strong authentication of both agencies involved in migration process. Security aspects of other popular mobile agent systems are described briefly. A comparison study with SSH protocol is performed and future work is elaborated.


Author(s):  
Mohammed Hussain ◽  
David B. Skillicorn

Mobile agents are self-contained programs that migrate among computing devices to achieve tasks on behalf of users. Autonomous and mobile agents make it easier to develop complex distributed systems. Many applications can benefit greatly from employing mobile agents, especially e-commerce. For instance, mobile agents can travel from one e-shop to another, collecting offers based on customers’ preferences. Mobile agents have been used to develop systems for telecommunication networks, monitoring, information retrieval, and parallel computing. Characteristics of mobile agents, however, introduce new security issues which require carefully designed solutions. On the one hand, malicious agents may violate privacy, attack integrity, and monopolize hosts’ resources. On the other hand, malicious hosts may manipulate agents’ memory, return wrong results from system calls, and deny access to necessary resources. This has motivated research focused on devising techniques to address the security of mobile-agent systems. This chapter surveys the techniques securing mobile-agent systems. The survey categorizes the techniques based on the degree of collaboration used to achieve security. This categorization resembles the difference between this chapter and other surveys in the literature where categorization is on the basis of entities/ parts protected and underlying methodologies used for protection. This survey shows the importance of collaboration in enhancing security and discusses its implications and challenges.


Author(s):  
Fei Xue

As an emerging technology, mobile agents can facilitate distributed computing applications over computer networks. During the past decade, the advance of computer software and hardware has led the structure and logic of mobile agents to become increasingly sophisticated. As a consequence, some security threats have started to appear in mobile agent systems (MASs).


Author(s):  
Stefan Bosse

Ubiquitous computing and The Internet-of-Things (IoT) grow rapidly in today's life and evolving to Self-organizing systems (SoS). A unified and scalable information processing and communication methodology is required. In this work, mobile agents are used to merge the IoT with Mobile and Cloud environments seamless. A portable and scalable Agent Processing Platform (APP) provides an enabling technology that is central for the deployment of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in strong heterogeneous networks including the Internet. A large-scale use-case deploying Multi-agent systems in a distributed heterogeneous seismic sensor and geodetic network is used to demonstrate the suitability of the MAS and platform approach. The MAS is used for earthquake monitoring based on a new incremental distributed learning algorithm applied to seismic station data, which can be extended by ubiquitous sensing devices like smart phones. Different (mobile) agents perform sensor sensing, aggregation, local learning and prediction, global voting and decision making, and the application.


2014 ◽  
Vol 02 (03) ◽  
pp. 231-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guofei Chai ◽  
Che Lin ◽  
Zhiyun Lin ◽  
Weidong Zhang

This paper deals with the cooperative source localization problem for a cluster of mobile agents. The goal of each agent is to estimate the relative coordinate of a stationary source in its local frame via a cooperative manner. It is assumed that each agent may or may not have direct range measurements about the source or some neighbors. Collaboration among agents is desired so that every agent is able to estimate the relative coordinate of the source in real time though some agents may not have direct range measurements about the source. A novel discrete-time estimator and a consensus-like fusion scheme are developed for the problem. It is shown that the estimator together with the fusion scheme are globally asymptotically stable under very mild conditions. Numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document