Securing mobile agents for crisis management support

Supporting emergency responders with mobile software agents promise increasing the efficiency of crisis management. While mobile agents offer many advantages, they also pose new challenges to security. However, security is a key prerequisite in crisis situations. A main security requirement is to create an agent execution environment that will not attack the agents. To secure mobile agents we have created an architecture that uses Trusted Computing to create a trusted execution environment for mobile agents on commodity-of-the-shelf computing hardware. We protect the load-time integrity of the trusted execution environment by measuring its software configuration and using a local attestation verification token to verify the software configuration. This token is the Secure Docking Module, a security chip protecting the cryptographic resources required to join the mobile agent software platform and authorize mobile agents. The SDM is implemented on a modern security chip. With our security architecture we can provide a mobile agent platform that is resilient against malicious agent execution environments, making the use of mobile agents in crisis management viable.