Security issues in mobile agent technology

The Mobile Agent (MA) paradigm seems to be a promising technology for developing applications in open, distributed and heterogeneous environments, such us the Internet. Many application areas, such as electronic commerce, mobile computing, network management and information retrieval can benefit from the application of the MA technology. The exploitation of mobile agents offer several peculiar advantages, such us reduction of network latency, asynchronous execution, robust and fault tolerant behavior. However, a wider diffusion of MA is currently limited by the lack of a comprehensive security framework that can address the security concerns arising in mobile agent applications providing efficiency at the same time. This paper describes an MA environment, called Secure and Open Mobile Agent (SOMA), that offers a wide range of security tools and mechanisms aimed at protecting both execution sites and agents against reciprocal malicious behavior. In particular, SOMA integrates several possible solutions to ensure agent integrity. The paper presents an electronic marketplace prototype based on SOMA where we have validated the efficiency and scalability of our security framework.