A new solution for assigning cryptographic keys to control access in mobile agent environments

Abstract

AbstractA mobile agent is a technological promising product. It is an executive program that can migrate from host to host, performing tasks autonomously. However, in an open environment, the mobile agent has many potential threats. Security becomes a critical issue for the mobile agent. Recently, Volker and Mehradad have constructed a mobile agent structure and designed a key assignment strategy to prevent the sensitive data to from being accessed by an unauthorized host. However, their scheme requires a larger agent size and a higher computational cost. In this paper, we shall propose an efficient key assignment scheme to enhance the performance of Volker and Mehradad's scheme. Only few computations and a fixed and small storage are required in our proposed scheme. Furthermore, our scheme can achieve the dynamic key management efficiently. It can also be implemented simply and practically. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.