scholarly journals Novel Directory Service and Message Delivery Mechanism Enabling Scalable Mobile Agent Communication

2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 333-349
Author(s):  
Jinho Ahn
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Agent ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Maintenance Cost ◽  
Message Delivery ◽  
Agent Communication ◽  
Directory Service ◽  
Mobile Agent Systems ◽  
Service Oriented ◽  
Delivery Mechanism

Mobile agent technology has emerged as a promising programming paradigm for developing highly dynamic and large-scale service-oriented computing middlewares due to its desirable features. For this purpose, first of all, scalable location-transparent agent communication issue should be addressed in mobile agent systems despite agent mobility. Although there were proposed several directory service and message delivery mechanisms, their disadvantages force them not to be appropriate to both low-overhead location management and fast delivery of messages to agents migrating frequently. To mitigate their limitations, this paper presents a scalable distributed directory service and message delivery mechanism. The proposed mechanism enables each mobile agent to autonomously leave tails of forwarding pointers on some few of its visiting nodes depending on its preferences. This feature results in low message forwarding overhead and low storage and maintenance cost of increasing chains of pointers per host. Also, keeping mobile agent location information in the effective binding cache of each sending agent, the sending agent can communicate with mobile agents much faster compared with the existing ones.

A SECURITY BASED MODEL FOR MOBILE AGENT SOFTWARE SYSTEMS

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (04) ◽  
pp. 719-746 ◽  
Author(s):  
HAIPING XU ◽  
ZHIGUO ZHANG ◽  
SOL M. SHATZ
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Agent ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Software Systems ◽  
Agent Communication ◽  
Agent Model ◽  
Agent Systems ◽  
Design Error ◽  
Mobile Agent Systems ◽  
High Level ◽  
Agent Migration

Security modeling for agents has been one of the most challenging issues in developing practical mobile agent software systems. In the past, researchers have developed mobile agent systems with emphasis either on protecting mobile agents from malicious hosts or protecting hosts from malicious agents. In this paper, we propose a security based mobile agent system architecture that provides a general solution to protecting both mobile agents and agent hosts in terms of agent communication and agent migration. We present a facilitator agent model that serves as a middleware for secure agent communication and agent migration. The facilitator agent model, as well as the mobile agent model, is based on agent-oriented G-nets — a high level Petri net formalism. To illustrate our formal modeling technique for mobile agent systems, we provide an example of agent migration to show how a design error can be detected.

Component Agent Systems

2011 ◽  
pp. 95-114
Author(s):  
Paulo Marques
Keyword(s):  
Technology Adoption ◽  
Network Management ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Mobile Agent ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Agent Platform ◽  
Agent Systems ◽  
Systems Research ◽  
Mobile Agent Systems ◽  
The Future

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.

Component Agent Systems

2009 ◽  
pp. 3300-3319
Author(s):  
Paulo Marques ◽  
Luís Silva
Keyword(s):  
Technology Adoption ◽  
Network Management ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Mobile Agent ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Agent Platform ◽  
Agent Systems ◽  
Systems Research ◽  
Mobile Agent Systems ◽  
The Future

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.

Embeddable Mobile-C for Runtime Support of Code Mobility in Multi-Agent Systems

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu-Cheng Chou ◽  
David Ko ◽  
Harry H. Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Operating Systems ◽  
Mobile Agent ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Distributed Applications ◽  
Multi Agent Systems ◽  
Agent Platform ◽  
Agent Systems ◽  
Code Mobility ◽  
Mobile Agent Systems ◽  
Multi Agent

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.

A Secure Migration Protocol for Mobile Agent Systems

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Najmus Saqib Malik ◽  
David Ko ◽  
Harry H. Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Agent ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Migration Process ◽  
Agent Platform ◽  
Agent Systems ◽  
Mobile Agent Systems ◽  
Automation Systems ◽  
Multi Agent ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Secure Shell

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.

INTER-CONFIDENTIALITY PROTECTION OF AGENT COMMUNICATION IN MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM BASED APPLICATIONS

2015 ◽  
Vol 77 (13) ◽  
Author(s):  
Olumide Simeon Ogunnusi ◽  
Shukor Abd Razak ◽  
Abdul Hanan Abdullah
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Agent ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Control Mechanism ◽  
Multi Agent System ◽  
Replay Attack ◽  
Agent Communication ◽  
Man In The Middle ◽  
Agent Interaction ◽  
Multi Agent ◽  
Execution Environment

Mobile agent interaction is usually vulnerable to attacks from within and outside the agent’s execution environment. Also, the mobility property of mobile agents earns them the opportunity to migrate from one security domain to another. Intranet/LAN with connection to internet do, from time to time, experience agent visitation either for malicious purpose or for legitimate mission. To protect legitimate agent communication against attack by visiting agent, we propose a technique that restricts migration of the visiting agent and isolate it to a neutral host where its mission could be achieved. We refer to this technique as restriction-based access control mechanism (ResBAC). The proposed mechanism employs certificate authentication, re-defining visiting agent itinerary path and visiting agent isolation to accomplish the aforementioned objective. The performance of the proposed mechanism is evaluated using scenarios to determine the strength of the mechanism in term of its ability to protect agent communication against the three major threats: man-in-the-middle attack, replay attack, and passive eavesdropping. 

Securing Mobile-Agent Systems through Collaboration

2010 ◽  
pp. 154-180
Author(s):  
Mohammed Hussain ◽  
David B. Skillicorn
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Agent ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Telecommunication Networks ◽  
Agent Systems ◽  
Security Issues ◽  
System Calls ◽  
Mobile Agent Systems ◽  
Privacy Attack ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The One

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.

Mobile Agents and Security

2011 ◽  
pp. 457-462
Author(s):  
Fei Xue
Keyword(s):  
Distributed Computing ◽  
Mobile Agent ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Computer Software ◽  
Emerging Technology ◽  
Security Threats ◽  
Agent Systems ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mobile Agent Systems ◽  
Software And Hardware

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).

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