Security Framework for Mobile Agents-Based Applications

2012 ◽  
pp. 242-269
Author(s):  
Raja Al-Jaljouli ◽  
Jemal H. Abawajy
Keyword(s):  
Resource Management ◽  
Intrusion Detection ◽  
Mobile Agent ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Security Level ◽  
Security Threats ◽  
Security Framework ◽  
Agent System ◽  
Agent Platform ◽  
Security Properties

Mobile agents have been proposed for key applications such as forensics analysis, intrusion detection, e-commerce, and resource management. Yet, they are vulnerable to various security threats by malicious hosts or intruders. Conversely, genuine platforms may run malicious agents. It is essential to establish a truly secure framework for mobile agents to gain trust of clients in the system. Failure to accomplish a trustworthy secured framework for Mobile Agent System (MAS) will limit their deployment into the key applications. This chapter presents a comprehensive taxonomy of various security threats to Mobile Agent System and the existing implemented security mechanisms. Different mechanisms are discussed, and the related security deficiencies are highlighted. The various security properties of the agent and the agent platform are described. The chapter also introduces the properties, advantages, and roles of agents in various applications. It describes the infrastructure of the system and discusses several mobile agent frameworks and the accomplished security level.

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.

scholarly journals Security for Mobile Agents: Trust Estimate for Platforms

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 381
Author(s):  
Razouki Hassan ◽  
Hair Abdellatif
Keyword(s):  
Distributed Computing ◽  
Mobile Agent ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Security Threats ◽  
Computing Technology ◽  
Open Network ◽  
Degree Of Confidence ◽  
Mobile Agent Security ◽  
Malicious Host

The mobile agent has been seen as a promising distributed computing technology. The mobility characteristic of mobile agent makes it to travel often in open network. In this scenario, it is obvious that the mobile agents are vulnerable to various security threats. Protecting free-roaming mobile agents from malicious host and from other mobile agents has drawn much attention in recent years. The protection of mobile agents is considered as one of the greatest challenges of security, because the platform of execution has access to all the components of the mobile agent. In this paper, we present a new architecture paradigm of mobile agents, which allows the separation of the implementation tasks of the agent and its security mechanisms. Our approach is based on using two strategies of adaptation to adapt the mobile agent security at runtime, depending on the sensitivity of the services required to perform the duties of the agent and the degree of confidence of the visited platforms.

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.

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).

RELIABILITY CONCEPTS FOR MOBILE AGENTS

1998 ◽  
Vol 07 (04) ◽  
pp. 355-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARKUS STRASSER ◽  
KURT ROTHERMEL
Keyword(s):  
Fault Tolerance ◽  
Electronic Commerce ◽  
Mobile Agent ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Fault Tolerant ◽  
Agent Technology ◽  
System Management ◽  
Agent System ◽  
Travel Plan ◽  
Node Failures

The use of mobile agent technology has been proposed for various fault-sensitive application areas, including electronic commerce and system management. A prerequisite for the use of mobile agents in these environments is that agents have to be executed reliably, independent of communication and node failures. In this article, we present two approaches improving the level of fault-tolerance in agent execution. The introduction of an itinerary concept allows to specify an agent's travel plan flexibly and provides the agent system with the possibility to postpone the visit of currently unavailable nodes or to choose alternative nodes in case of node failures. The second approach is a recently proposed fault-tolerant protocol to ensure the exactly-once execution of an agent. With this protocol, agents are preformed in stages. Each stage consists of a number of nodes. One of these nodes executes the agent while the others monitor the execution. After a summary of this protocol, we focus on the construction of stages. In particular, we investigate how the number of nodes per stage influences the probability of an agent to be blocked due to failures and which nodes should be selected when forming a stage to minimize the protocol overhead.

A Security Strategy of Mobile Agent System

2013 ◽  
Vol 336-338 ◽  
pp. 2401-2405
Author(s):  
Ying Li ◽  
Bao Fang Hu ◽  
Chen Lin Wei
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Agent ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Digital Certificate ◽  
Security Strategy ◽  
Agent System ◽  
Security Issues ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Party ◽  
Agent Migration

The paper aims at the security issues of the mobile agent system to propose a mobile agent system based on tracking mechanism which has a third-party certification center similar to an authority sector, whose hosts and mobile agents in mobile agent system are required to be registered in the third-party certification center so as to obtain a digital certificate issued by the third-party certification center. Each server launching mobile agent has a static communication agent Tracker, responsible for maintaining the context information launched by the mobile agent and agent migration thereby solving problems in the labyrinth and authentication of mobile agent in traditional mobile agent system so that the existing mobile agent system can become more secure and reliable.

scholarly journals Mobi-X Architecture Modelling for Mobile Agent using Association Pattern Mining

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 1167-1174
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Agent ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Pattern Mining ◽  
Tree Structure ◽  
Elapse Time ◽  
Agent System ◽  
Knowledge Mining ◽  
Mining Procedure ◽  
X Architecture ◽  
Virtual Experiences

In a mobile agent system, if agents’ functionality can be assessed and evaluated between peers of environmental modelling, it can reduce the exploration burden of unvisited states and unseen situations, thus an effectual learning process has to be accelerated. So as to construct an accurate and effectual model in certain time period is a significant problem, specifically in complex environment. To overcome this crisis, the investigation anticipates a model based data mining approach based on tree structure to achieve co-ordination amongst the mobile agent, effectual modelling and less memory utilization. The anticipated model suggests Mobi-X architecture to mobile agent system with a tree structure for effectual modelling. The construction of tree for real time mobile agent system is utilized to generate virtual experiences like elapse time during mining of tree structure. In addition, this model is appropriate for knowledge mining. This work is inspired by knowledge mining concept in mobile agent systems where an agent can built a global model from scattered local model held by individual agents. Subsequently, it increases modelling accuracy to offer valid simulation outcome for indirect learning at initial stage of mining. In order to simplify mining procedure, this anticipated model relies on re-sampling approach with associative rule mining to grafting branches of constructed tree. The tree structure provides the functions of mobile agents with useful experience from peer to peer connectivity, indeed of combining all the available agents. The simulation outcomes shows that proposed re-sampling can attain efficiency and accelerate the functionality of mobile agents based cooperation applications.

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