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Title |
Security Enhancements for Mobile Agents Platforms |
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Author |
HAMED AOUADI, PR MOHAMED BEN AHMED |
| Citation |
Vol. 6 No. 7 pp. 216-221 |
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Abstract |
Mobile agents technology is considered as a promised solution for distributed electronic services on the Internet. However, agents that roam the Internet can be attacked on them roads or on the visited hosts. In our researches we interest in protecting mobile agents on visited hosts. So, this paper will in first part present the state of the art of securing mobile agents against malicious hosts and in second part an approach that we suggest. In such state of the art, we identify strong and high cost approaches based on the use of additional hardware and weak and low cost approaches based on software solutions. In our approach, we upgrade mobile agents platforms by security enhancements to produce a secure execution environment that we call SVM (Secure Virtual Machine). Thus, an agent is ciphered, signed (in part) and time stamped. On visited host, the agent will be exclusively executed by the secure virtual machine SVM without decrypting it. The cipher algorithm that we use is based on the segmentation of the agent, obfuscation of the segments, a symmetric encryption of every segment and the mess-up of segment execution sequence. The security enhancements will be introduced in the loader of agents, the runtime and network access part. Finally, the entire platform will be itself protected by a smart card. |
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Keywords |
Mobile agents, cryptography, security, SVM |
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