Implementing Security in Mobile Agents by using AES Technique

Abstract

Mobile Agent is a program which travels from one platform to another in order to get its work done. An agent is safe in its owner site but when it ventures out and gets executed on some other platform, it becomes vulnerable to many attacks. There are many counter measures that have been proposed in this paper to overcome these attacks. Cryptography based technique i.e. Symmetric Key Algorithm (specifically AES) is one such counter measure taken to provide security. An example case study of client server application has been considered to address the issue of security. Mobile agent is implemented on the aglet client agent host using a platform known as Aglet. Aglet is a java object which moves in a network and gets executed on host which are aglet enabled. AES using Aglet and Java have been implemented to provide security to the mobile agent. The results show how the client agent and server agent can exchange information over internet in a secure manner. The private data entered by client agent is encrypted using AES key which is provided by the server agent to the client agent in an encrypted form. This means that only server agent can decrypt this because he has AES key. Keywords: Mobile Agent [MA], Aglets, AES, Encryption, Decryption