A Flexible Tamper-Detection Protocol for Mobile Agents on Open Networks

摘要

Security is an important issue in mobile agent system. A mobile agent can be easily attacked by malicious hosts, especially if it is executed on an open network where there is no trusted third party. This paper presents a new protocol to protect execution of mobile agents by using cooperating agents: a coordinator to coordinate a detector to protect the mobile agent; and a detector to detect if the agent's states have been tampered with. They continuously monitor the mobile agent and detect any malicious hosts along the agent's itinerary. The protocol can preserve the asynchronous execution characteristics of mobile agents, and is flexible since hosts need only to provide data storage service in order to deploy the protocol. The idea of the detection mechanism of the protocol is derived from the execution trace approach and code obfuscation.