Secure Mobile Agent System for E-Business Applications

Mobile agent systems provide a great flexibility and customizability to distributed applications like ebusiness and information retrieval in the current scenario. Security is a crucial concern for such systems, especially when they are to be used to deal with money transaction. Mobile agents moving around the network are not safe as the remote hosts that accommodate the agents can initiate all kinds of attacks and attempt to analyze the agents' decision logic and agents' accumulated data. Hence mobile agent security is one of the most challenging problems unsolved. This paper analyzes the security attacks to mobile agents by malicious hosts and proposes solutions based on public key authentication technique and cryptography to address some of these problems. An experimental application is developed and security and performance of proposed solutions are also evaluated.