The Role of Secret Sharing in the Distributed MARE Protocols

In a mobile agent based distributed system, agents must survive malicious failures of the hosts they visit, and they must be resilient to the potentially hostile actions of other hosts. The replication and voting are necessary to survive malicious behavior by visited hosts. However, faulty hosts that are not visited by agents can confound a naive replica management scheme by spoofing. This problem can be solved by cryptographic protocols. This paper describes the role of cryptographic methods in the protocols for the MARE architecture, which is a fault-tolerant mobile agent replication system. In this system, secret sharing takes on an important role in facilitating mobile processes by distributed authentication.