A secure and open mobile agent programming environment

The Mobile Agent technology is suitable for applications in open, distributed and heterogeneous environments such as the Internet and the Web, because it can overcome some limits of traditional approaches. The paper describes a Secure and Open Mobile Agent (SOMA) programming environment with two main design objectives that are security and interoperability. On the one hand SOMA is based on a thorough security model and provides a wide range of tools and mechanisms to build and enforce flexible security policies. On the other hand, the SOMA framework can interoperate with different application components designed with different programming styles. SOMA grants interoperability by closely considering compliance with CORBA, the most diffused standard in the area of Object-Oriented components. SOMA has been adopted as a platform to develop several distributed applications in the area of network and systems management, CSCW, and distributed and heterogeneous information systems.