Evaluating the Security of Three Java-Based Mobile Agent Systems

The goal of mobile agent systems is to provide a distributed computing infrastructure supporting applications whose components can move between different execution environments. The design and implementation of mechanisms to relocate computations requires a careful assessment of security issues. If these issues are not addressed properly, mobile agent technology cannot be used to implement real-world applications. This paper describes the initial steps of a research effort to design and implement security middleware for mobile code systems in general and mobile agent systems in particular. This initial phase focused on understanding and evaluating the security mechanisms of existing mobile agent systems. The evaluation was performed by deploying several mobile agents systems in a testbed network, implementing attacks on the systems, and evaluating the results. The long term goal for this research is to develop guidelines for the security analysis of mobile agent systems and to determine if existing systems provide the security abstractions and mechanisms needed to develop real-world applications.