V. Gunupudi and S.R. Tate (USA)
Software Development, Software Reuse, Distributed Agents, Mobile Agent Security, Frameworks for Mobile Agents
In this paper, we present the design of SAgent, a general purpose mobile agent security framework. SAgent is de signed for comprehensive protection of mobile agent com putations and data in potentially hostile environments and works with the JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment) plat form [1], a FIPA-compliant multi-agent environment. Us ing good software engineering design techniques of soft ware reusability and abstraction, SAgent allows agent pro tection protocols and applications to be developed indepen dently of each other. To accomplish this, a clean concep tual framework is presented which encapsulates in several general class interfaces the common security functionality required by secure agent applications. Since SAgent is de signed to generically protect the computations of mobile agent applications, we provide implementations of two se cure multiagent protocols that protect the confidentiality of agent data as well as implementations of four methods that protect the integrity of mobile agent data. Experimental results showing the feasibility of these methods are avail able in separate publications [2] [3]. The goal of SAgent is to provide a framework where proposed theoretical tech niques can be used and experimentally evaluated. SAgent allows a new security provider to implement and experi ment with new techniques for protecting mobile agents in a well-defined manner and is generic enough to support both software-based and hardware-based protections.
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