Hierarchical Time-Bound Key Management for Mobile Agents

Abstract

The core competencies that a mobile agent possesses are free-roaming between different environment, and autonomous environment detection and adaptation while executing the tasks that are assigned by the users. Because of these competencies, the concept of mobile agent is widely used in many different fields, such as Internet business, wireless communication, and information security technologies and etc. In 1983, Akl and Taylor [1] suggested the concept of superkey to resolve the key management issues faced by the mobile agent. Later in 1998, Volker and Mehrdad [2] proposed a hierarchical mobile agent model for access control. The proposed paper would be based upon the studies of superkey and a hierarchical mobile agent model with addition of elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC). ECC enhances the mobile agent model, because of shorter key length and higher efficiency on encryption and decryption. All the related works would be presented in Section 2. After the background of our proposal is well described, we would aim to resolve the key management issue created by Volker and Mehrdad's model. Time-bound key management is considered to be a good solution, because it can make the key management in the existing mobile agent model more convenient by distributing the keys that can only be used in a limited period of time.