Securing mobile agent and its platform from passive attack of malicious mobile agents

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. Most of the existing work deals with the protection of mobile agent from malicious host or protecting the host from malicious agents. The issue of protecting a mobile agent from a malicious agent in the host's agent execution environment is not given much attention. Further, for applications like secure data transaction, it is an essential criterion to protect the retrieved data and the address of dynamically selected remote servers. This paper provides an environment that protects the legitimate mobile agent from the malicious mobile agent that performs passive attacks like eavesdropping. To ensure the confidentiality of the data that are retrieved from each remote server a serial encryption technique is implemented. The remote server's address that is selected dynamically is also secured to face the possible eavesdropping threat. The three dimensional security scheme presented in this paper for free-roaming mobile agent addresses the code, data and itinerary security issues.