The mobile agent is a fundamental building block of the mobile computing paradigm. In mobile agent security, oblivious transfer (OT) from a trusted party can be used to protect the agent's privacy and the hosts' privacy. In this paper, we introduce a new cryptographic primitive called Verifiable Distributed Oblivious Transfer (VDOT), which allows us to replace a single trusted party with a group of threshold trusted servers. The design of VDOT uses two novel techniques, consistency verification of encrypted secret shares and consistency verification through re-randomization. VDOT protects the privacy of both the sender and the receiver against malicious attacks of the servers. We also show the design of a system to apply VDOT to protect the privacy of mobile agents. Our design partitions an agent into the general portion and the security-sensitive portion. We also implement the key components of our system. As far as we know, this is the first effort to implement a system thatprotects the privacy of mobile agents. Our preliminary evaluation shows that protecting mobile agents not only is possible, but also can be implemented efficiently.
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