Handling vulnerabilities with mobile agents in order to consider the delay and disruption tolerant characteristic of military networks

Abstract

With the development of modern military warfare towards Network Centric Warfare (NCW), small mobile computers or devices that form tactical ad-hoc networks play an important role. These automatically established networks provide soldiers with information necessary to accomplish their mission. It has to be assumed that hostile forces manage to install malware on a mobile device by exploiting software vulnerabilities in order to spy out mission-specific information. Therefore, a vulnerability management in combination with a patch management is a pro-active countermeasure to improve network security. Most of the vulnerability and patch management systems use a Client-Server architecture. In this paper, we discuss the usage of Mobile Agents for this task. Through this approach, it is possible to consider the properties of military ad-hoc networks such as non-permanently existing end-to-end paths.