Abstrait

A Survey on Protection Techniques of Mobile Agents from Malicious Hosts

Somnath Dey, Prof. Dr. Devadatta Sinha

Mobile agent technology has become a new paradigm of distributed computing that can replace the conventional client-server model. Despite its many practical benefits, it results in significant new security threats from malicious agents and from malicious hosts. Many techniques for the first have been developed. The second problem seems to be much harder. We will focus on the second one. We found that there is not a single, comprehensive solution that provides complete protection of agents against malicious hosts. Existing solutions either only detect or to some extent prevent attacks on agents. This paper gives a comparative survey on of the main security issues related to the mobile agent paradigm. These issues include security threats, security requirements and techniques for keeping the mobile agent secure against malicious hosts.