A Design of Secure Mobile Agent Systems Employing ID based Digital Multi-Signature Scheme

Mobile agent comes into the spotlight since it contributes largely to mobile computing on distributed network environment. However, this system has a number of significant security problems. In this paper, we analyze security attacks to mobile agent system presented by NIST[3]. In order to protect this system from them, we suggest a security protocol for mobile agent system by employing ID based key distribution and digital multi-signature scheme. To solve these problems described in NIST, securities for mobile agent and agent platform should be accomplished. Comparing with other protocols, our protocol performs both of these securities, while other protocols mentioned only on of them. Proposed protocol satisfies simplicity of key management, providing security service such as confidentiality, integrity, authentication and preventing reputation, liveness guarantee, protection of execution-result data and preventing replay attack. Furthermore, it is design to detect message modification immediately by verifying each step of agent execution at a corresponding server.