Title: A Father/Foster Security Protocol
for Mobile Agent Code
Abstract: A
potential range of applications are based on the use of mobile agent
code technology. Among the significant areas of applications are
artificial intelligence,
industrial and management applications, data mining and distributed
data
bases. The Mobile Agent Code technology is based on the idea of
traveling
program code, the code travels from one node of the computers network
to
another node. The most challenging problem is the security problems.
Security
risks involve the security of the agent code and the security of the
hosting
machine. Among these security problems is the self proving of the
agent
code. The code has to prove its identity as a legitimately initiated
code,
initiated by a legitimate father machine. Proving this legitimacy
includes
proving that the code is legally generated and the operations it
performs
are legitimate. In this paper a Father/Foster protocol is introduced
for
proving the code legitimacy. Machines are classified to two classes,
the
father machine, and the foster machine. Father machine generates the
mobile
agent code; foster machine runs the mobile agent code. Father machine
must
guaranty the legitimacy of the generated code to the foster machine and
the
foster machine accepts to foster the code accordingly. The research
also
includes a critical analysis of the proposed protocol.
Author: Hasan
Al-Saedy