A survey on distributed mobile agents' system security

Abstract

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system in which there is a cooperation of autonomous entities called 'agents', with intelligent behaviour, and have the power to coordinate their goals and action plans to solve a problem or achieve an objective. They are widely applied in telecommunications and e-commerce. In this paper we investigate the security of the distributed mobile agents' system. We also discuss the problem of availability of a mobile agent while exposing an overview about the DDoS which is the major attack that threatens the availability in a system. Furthermore, we establish a method to guarantee the confidentiality and secure mobility of a mobile agent during its migration in a distributed system by combining the principle of serialisation and cryptography.