Monickaraj Vigilson Prem and Sankaranarayanan Swamynathan
Mobile agents, dynamic itinerary, security, service directory, e-service, tailgating attack, denial of service attack
A mobile agent (MA) is computational software that has the capacity to migrate between nodes in the network, based on their mobility characteristics. Since the MAs are applied in distributed systems, their code, data and state are exposed to different security threats. While many of the existing works addresses the attack by the malicious host on the MA and vice-versa, this work focuses on a malicious mobile agent attacking a legal MA and itineraries that are dynamically selected. The first issue is addressed by verifying the agent’s identity initially and then the size of the agent. The second issue is solved by using the cryptographic mechanism and the corresponding public keys. The results of the tests conducted show that the turn around time of the MA is not severely affected by the inclusion of the security protocol. The effect of the denial of service attack on the host before and after implementing the security model is compared. The main advantages of this work are securing the legal MAs that are executing in the same platform, from the attack of the malicious ones. Another benefit is, eliminating the overhead in itinerary list protection by implementing the dynamic itinerary with dynamic order migration. For an e-service application, when the available work focuses on code and data security, this work focuses on protecting the agents from tailgating attacks. Further, when the existing work uses static itinerary with static or dynamic order for the MA migration, this work uses dynamic itinerary with dynamic order.
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