Efficient Key Management Scheme for Hierarchical Access Control in Mobile Agents

摘要

Mobile agents have great potential for increasing the realized benefit for a variety of e-commerce applications. However, enabling the mobile agent to safely travel over the open and uncontrollable Internet is necessary to protect the contents of a mobile agent. Recently, many agent structures that manage the keys needed to provide the access control mechanism for mobile agents have been developed. Nevertheless, these structures require either large amount of mobile codes or heavy computation loads. In this paper, a lightweight key management method for hierarchical access control in mobile agent environments is proposed. This method not only provides access control for mobile agents but also reduces the agent size as well as cuts down the computations cost.