Mobile Agents in Electronic Markets: Opportunities, Risks, Agent Protection

This article characterizes the tasks that mobile software agents can perform in electronic markets, the risks they entail, and the appropriate protective mechanisms. Market servers have to be protected against malicious agents, and mobile agents have to be protected against malicious hosts. The latter is quite difficult, because a host must be able to read an agent's code and data in order to execute them. Several approaches to protecting mobile agents are surveyed and evaluated, and the possible application fields for each are examined. One of the approaches is used to develop an electronic market architecture for mobile agents that provides market participants with security and anonymity.

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