Mobile Agent Mechanism And Safety Studies

Mobile agent is a program that can migrate autonomously among hostsin the heterogeneous network. It determines when and where to migrateand can clone itself or create sub-agents that cooperate to finish thecomplicated task. Our mobile agents system MADE is a secure, efficient, robust openmobile agent platform. It consists of agent transport layer, server layer,and agent application layer.To improve the performance of mobile agents system, we see agentcode as a set of named classes (or code blocks) in MADE. These classesare dynamically loaded on demand through CodeBroker transparent oftheir network distribution. This code migration model improves theperformance, fault tolerance, and resource share of mobile agents system.Especially in Java based mobile agents system, it can take advantage ofrich library classes in Java environment and improve the performance effectively.Security is perhaps the most critical issue in the mobile-agent system, neither the agent nor the machines are trust worthy. The security request of the mobile-agent system is to protect the agent from the attack of the malicious machine and agent as well as to protect the machine from the attack of the hostile agent.Hierarchical integratedsecure model in JADE provides effective, extensible security framework for mobile agent by integrating bi-direction authentication , authorization, Java security policy, environment based key generation, and audit log.