Mobile agents integrity in e-commerce applications

The mobile agent (MA) paradigm seems able to support effectively distributed applications in open and heterogeneous environments, and application areas such as e-commerce appears to be of particular interest. Mobility, autonomy and easy personalization are distinguishing properties of the MA paradigm that can support e-commerce transactions by helping in information gathering, filtering and negotiation. However, MA systems, despite these offered advantages, experience a limited usage because they lack a comprehensive security framework. Only a full answer to the requirement of protection for both execution sites and mobile shopping agents can permit the adoption of MA solutions in the electronic market. This paper describes an MA environment, called Secure and Open Mobile Agent (SOMA), that supports secure and open e-commerce applications. In particular, the paper focuses on how mobile shopping agents can be protected from malicious behavior of execution sites and describes a distributed multiple-hops integrity protocol integrated in SOMA.