Distributed Authorization Framework for Mobile Agents

Mobile agent systems provide new perspectives for distributed e-commerce applications. These applications may present specific restrictions, making mobile agent systems a feasible solution. Even so, mobile agents present some security related problems. An important one is resource access control. The ability for mobile agents to provide a simple, scalable, flexible, and secure access control system is a key point for the widespread adoption of mobile agents. In this paper we propose a mechanism to safely assign roles to mobile agents and an access control method based on Role-based Access Control (RBAC). The access control method provides a simple, lightweight and distributed model for mobile agent applications. It is proposed as an extension of the MARISM-A (An Architecture for Mobile Agents with Recursive Itineraries and Secure Migration) project, a secure mobile agent platform.

[1]  Jeffrey M. Bradshaw,et al.  KAoS: toward an industrial-strength open agent architecture , 1997 .

[2]  Michael R. Genesereth,et al.  Software agents , 1994, CACM.

[3]  Jeffrey M. Bradshaw,et al.  An Overview of the NOMADS Mobile Agent System , 2000 .

[4]  Joan Feigenbaum,et al.  The KeyNote Trust-Management System , 1998 .

[5]  Jeffrey M. Bradshaw,et al.  NOMADS: toward a strong and safe mobile agent system , 2000, AGENTS '00.

[6]  Yuh-Jong Hu.  Some thoughts on agent trust and delegation , 2001, AGENTS '01.

[7]  Jan Vitek,et al.  Secure Internet Programming , 1999 .

[8]  Nader Azarmi,et al.  Software Agents and Soft Computing Towards Enhancing Machine Intelligence , 1997, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[9]  Ramaswamy Chandramouli,et al.  The Queen's Guard: A Secure Enforcement of Fine-grained Access Control In Distributed Data Analytics Platforms , 2001, ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. Secur..

[10]  Sun Meifeng,et al.  KeyNote Trust Management System , 2002 .

[11]  Joan Borrell,et al.  Implementation of Secure Architectures for Mobile Agents in MARISM-A , 2002, MATA.

[12]  Tuomas Aura,et al.  Distributed Access-Rights Managements with Delegations Certificates , 2001, Secure Internet Programming.

[13]  J. Feigenbaum,et al.  The KeyNote trust management system version2, IETF RFC 2704 , 1999 .

[14]  Ninghui Li,et al.  Distributed Credential Chain Discovery in Trust Management , 2003, J. Comput. Secur..

[15]  James E. White,et al.  Mobile Agents , 1997, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[16]  J.C.A. van der Lubbe,et al.  Privacy in mobile agents , 2004, IEEE First Symposium onMulti-Agent Security and Survivability, 2004.

[17]  E. Horlait.  Mobile Agents for Telecommunication Applications , 2003, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[18]  Anand R. Tripathi,et al.  Protected resource access for mobile agent-based distributed computing , 1998, Proceedings of the 1998 ICPP Workshop on Architectural and OS Support for Multimedia Applications Flexible Communication Systems. Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing (Cat. No.98EX206).

[19]  Butler W. Lampson,et al.  SPKI Certificate Theory , 1999, RFC.

[20]  Ninghui Li,et al.  Distributed credential chain discovery in trust management: extended abstract , 2001, CCS '01.