A Model for Mobile Agent Security in E-Business Applications

Mobile agent systems provide a great flexibility and customizability to distributed applications like e-business and information retrieval in the current scenario. Security is a crucial concern for such systems, especially when they are used to deal with money transactions. Mobile agents moving around the network are not safe because the remote hosts that accommodate the agents can initiate all kinds of attacks and can attempt to analyze the agents' decision logic and their accumulated data. Hence, mobile agent security is one of the most challenging unsolved problems. This paper analyzes the security attacks on mobile agents by malicious hosts and seeks to address some of these problems by proposing solutions based on public key authentication techniques and cryptography. The authors develop an experimental application and evaluate the security and performance of proposed solutions. They develop a performance model in order to tune the parameters of execution environment to meet the desired level of performance and security.

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