Securing Mobile-Agent-Based Systems Against Malicious Hosts
Loutfy H. Madkour, Fathy Elbouraey Eassa, Abdullah Fathi Aziz Ali, Noor U. Qayyum · 2014
Mobile agent technology is an attractive alternative to traditional network computing models. It is suitable to many different types of distributed systems' applications. The main obstacle for the widespread deployment of the mobile agent technology is the security issue, in particular the problem of protecting a mobile agent from malicious hosts that may completely block the agent or modify its accumulated data. The present work aims to introduce a solution for this problem based on identifying and skipping malicious blocking hosts within the mobile agent's itinerary. The solution is extended without using expensive cryptographic techniques to ensure the integrity of the accumulated data when the agent eventually returns home. The proposed solution is simulated to examine feasibility, correctness and scalability of the developed protocol. A prototype is built and tested to investigate practical aspects of the solution.