A mobile agent is a piece of software which is able to migrate and execute on a remote host. The host may accept the agents without knowing the result in advance of executing the agents. Malicious mobile agents or malicious third parties may launch attacks and do harm to the host. In addition, poorly coded agents in some cases may also exhibit malicious behaviors to the host. Mobile agents are coded in a variety of scripting or interpreted languages, and by simply using static semantic analysis for pre-detecting potential hazards cannot provide a generic solution. To effectively discern, and thereby protect the hosts against such potential threats, is a challenge in the mobile agent research community.; Our research at IMAGO (an intelligent mobile agent system) group, is seeking ways of protecting hosts against such possible threats with regard to the system resources available. This thesis presents a mobile agent system called IMAGO (Intelligent Mobile Agent Gliding Online) System and the related security architecture. It introduces the ways of protecting hosts against such possible threats. It also demonstrates how the security services are integrated into the IMAGO system and achieve an insignificant overhead by the means of several innovative designs and techniques.
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