A Survey of E-Business SecurityFor Mobile Multi-Agent Environment

Agent technology is a very emerging field of research. Various classes of agents (e.g. intelligent agents, software agents) have emerged so far. Software Agents including Mobile Agents are useful for Distributed Systems & Electronic Commerce. E-Commerce and M-Commerce can help a company or enterprise to extend its market place to unlimited region. With the increasing market of Electronic Commerce it becomes an interesting aspect to use autonomous Mobile Agents (MAs) for Electronic Business transactions. Since, various components of E-business can be represented by Software Agent/ Mobile Agents it can be viewed as a multiagent environment. To fully deploy agents in multi-agent environment require addressing number of challenging issues like Security, Fault Tolerance, Location Management and Privacy of both agents and executing environment. However, scope of this paper is limited to security of mobile agents in a multi-agent environment for Electronic Business applications. Security is focused mainly on protection and security of agents and its runtime environment, but most of the currently available mobile agent systems do not support comprehensive security requirements for a general Mobile Agents paradigm. Therefore, there is a need for a complete and comprehensive security infrastructure for mobile agents, not only in the form of security services and mechanisms for agents runtime execution, but also as a complete set of infrastructural components along with methodology for creation, classification, adoption, and validation of Mobile agents, before their deployment in realenvironment. This paper studies the various security solutions proposed by researchers for Mobile Agents in Multi Agent environment for Electronic business applications and analyze then on the basis of various parameters such as performance, requirements and complexity.