Developing Check-Point Mechanism to Protect Mobile Agent Free-Roaming Against Untrusted Hosts

Abstract

Mobile Agent has many benefits over traditional distributed systems such as reducing latency, bandwidth, and costs. Mobile Agent Systems are not fully utilized due to security problems. This paper focuses on mobile agent protection against malicious hosts. A new security mechanism called Checkpoints has been proposed. Checkpoint Mechanism (CPM) aims to protect Mobile Agent against malicious hosts in case of Capturing and Integrity attacks. CPM assumes using a free-roaming mobility mechanism by Mobile agent systems. The main idea behind CPM is to generate multiple versions of Mobile Agent. The multiple version is used to recover Mobile Agent from Capturing and Integrity attacks by untrusted hosts. MA versions are kept in Recovery Host(RH). RH plays a key role in CPM by controlling and monitoring MAs’ recovery processes. A prototype method has been used to prove the feasibility of CPM. The prototype was implemented by using the. Net framework and C#. full discussion for several scenarios has been done to analyze the feasibility and performance for CPM. As found from this research, CPM has a strong ability to protect Mobile Agents from Capturing and Integrity attacks completely. In addition, there is no negative impact on the overall performance of the mobile agent system.