SECURE SWITCHING MESSAGES MECHANISM FOR MOBILE AGENT COMMUNICATION AND TRACKING

摘要

In recent years, the interesting of using mobile agent technologies is rapidly grown. Mobile agent communication is one of the most important components of mobile agent systems. This component allows different entities in a mobile agent system to communicate. Many proposed mechanisms are introduced in this area but most of them deal with communication issue as protocol only and they miss to specify clearly how to deliver communication messages. This paper introduces a new mobile agent communication mechanism called Secure Switching Message Mechanism (SSMM). SSMM deals with how to deliver the communication messages through secure channels. The main idea behind this mechanism is to keep track of the mobile agents' movements during their journeys. One of the main players of this mechanism called Switching Message Entity that monitors these movements through secure notification messages from different parties of the system. Also, this entity establishes a secure session for communication messages. The security of SSMM comes from using cryptography mechanisms. In addition, the paper presents cost analysis for SSMM and as result of the analysis, SSMM reduces the communication time cost.