Abstract
Recently, agent-based software technology (ABST) has received widespread attention from the research community and users. However, security issues facing ABST are critical. When a mobile agent migrates from their home machine to perform tasks, the agent becomes vulnerable to attacks by the destination machine, which has full control over the visiting mobile agent. To address this security issue, we propose a dummy task selection (DTS) approach to protect the mobile agent by confusing the attacker (destination machine) with regard to distinguishing the real task among dummy attacks. Considering that side information may be employed by the attacker to perform advanced attacks, we introduce improved DTS as an enhancement of the DTS approach. The improved DTS approach generates strong dummy tasks based on execution probabilities that lead to the highest entropy. Unlike previous approaches, the improved-DTS approach performs the full protection mechanism at the home machine, which in turn limits the ability of the attacker to control the visiting mobile agent. Compared to previous approaches, both the DTS and improved-DTS methods achieved better performance and higher resistance to advanced active attacks such as alternation, collusion, and DoS attacks.
Highlights
Due to the mobility feature, where an agent can migrate from the home machine to the destination machine to perform tasks, security issues are critical in this technology
The results of executed tasks may lose their integrity, the behavior of the agent may be changed, and advanced active attacks, such as alternation, collusion, and denial of service (DoS) attacks, may be applied by the attacker. In responding to this issue, we present in this paper the dummy task selection (DTS) and improved-DTS approaches
From a historical database of tasks, the DTS randomly generates dummy tasks to protect the real task, aiming at confusing the attacker when determining the real task among the dummy tasks and limiting their ability to perform malicious actions
Summary
A. IMPORTANCE OF SOFTWARE AGENTS One of the most important software technologies used to manage and perform tasks over the Internet is agent-based software technology (ABST). A software agent is defined as an independent program that runs on behalf of a network user [1], [2]. Compared to other technologies such as message passing (MP) [3], remote procedure call (RPC) [4], and code on demand (CoD) [5], ABST achieves better performance in distributed systems in terms of scalability (for both increasing numbers of users and sizes of data), manipulation (at both access latency and tuning time levels), and network latency [2], [6]. Instead of sending the big data to the processing machine, an agent can be sent to the place where the big data are
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
