Protecing Mobile Agents against Malicious Hosts in an Internet-based E-commerce Environment

Xinfeng Yang    School of Information Technology,Griffith University, QLD 9726 Australia

Email:X.Yang@griffith.edu.au

Anne T-A Nguyen    School of Information Technology,Griffith University, QLD 9726 Australia

Email:A.Nguyen@griffith.edu.au

Keywords

Mobile agent, agent security, Internet-based e-commerce

Abstract

Applications of mobile agents in e-commerce environments have increasingly attracted attention from researchers and software developers. Nevertheless, there is still considerable reluctance to adopt mobile agents for such purposes. One major reason has been the security issues involved in allowing the relevant agent to visit remote hosts. This paper is primarily concerned with the risks associated with an agent being attacked by malicious hosts. Our research introduces several flexible and dynamic structures to enhance a mobile agent’s capability for self-protection. It can be demonstrated that the proposed approach is both feasible and more robust than most existing approaches to the same issue, as the latter typically involve predefined schemes to protect certain data components of the roaming agent.