SECURITY in MOBILE AGENT SYSTEMS: A MODEL to PROTECT AGAINST MALICIOUS HOST ATTACKS

摘要

There are four possible security attacks: Attacks from host to host, from agents to hosts, from agents to agents and finally from hosts to agents. Our main concern in this paper is attacks from a malicious host on an agent. These attacks can take many forms including rerouting, spying out code, spying out data, spying out control flow, manipulation of code, manipulation of data, manipulation of control flow, incorrect execution of code, masquerading and denial of execution. This paper presents a three-tier solution of code mess up, encryption and time out. Choosing code mess-up as part of the solution is due to the strength of this method that is based on obfuscating the features of the code so that any attacker finds it difficult to understand the original code. A new algorithm is developed to implement code mess-up that uses the concept of variable disguising by altering the values of strings and numerical values.