Privilege Management of Mobile Agents

Most mobile agent systems use internal data structures within an agent to control and specify its security requirements and properties. These structures typically contain authorization information regarding access to computational resources on distributed systems and conceptually serve as an internal passport for the agent. While these structures are often very similar semantically, they differ greatly in their implementation, depending to a large extent on the mechanisms used to protect their contents. This paper considers a general scheme for managing privileges using attribute certificates. An attribute certificate can be viewed as an external, digitally signed agent passport, which allows greater flexibility in meeting the needs of an application and overlaying a suitable management scheme. The paper presents the benefits of this approach and gives an example of how an agent system could be enhanced with this mechanism.