Research On Mobile Agent System Security

Mobile Agent is a special kind of Agent with the most fundamental characteristics as reaction, automomy, targeted-oriented and environmental-directed as well as mobility which it can travel automously form one host to another on network, representing users to do the specified job. Mobile agent can travel in the software/hardware network environment. Mobile agent system is a software platform which offers basic running surroundings for Mobile Agent to create, execute, communicate, migrate and terminate.The work-mode of migrate-compute-migrate as well as communication and cooperation among agents provide a new complete solution for the Internet-based distributed computing applications. Institutions in many companies and universities have already produced their own mobile agent systems, but it still needs time to put them into real commercial use. One of the main restrictions is the security problem of the mobile agent system.We researched on the security problem of mobile agent's migration and communication, protection of mainframe platform from intruding by malice agents and agents'self-protection.On the bases of many presented MA security approaches, we designed a new type of safe MA-DMUMAS system, providing our own security approaches. Concerning about security problems of MA's immigration and communication, our system protects it during the process by EMFS (efficiently message forwarding scheme) on the foundation of ATP (Agent Transfer Protocol) ; To protect the mainframe from being invaded by malice agents, DMUMAS divides resources into tow classes of systematic and application. Combining the advantages of the security manager and wrapper, we use the former to manage systematical resources, and the latter for application. It provides bi-protection for host resources through Security Manager, Wrapper and Proxy; MA itself is protected by the following two kinds of mechanisms: one is that the status of agent is set Read-only access by some procedures. For example, while MA immigrates in a settled route, any attack that tries to distort the Read-only status will be detached; another one is that a limited black-box created by proxy will protect our related information of Agent. Finally, the implementing methods of each security mechanisms are given.