Overview of mobile agents and security

Abstract

Mobile agent technology is an emerging concept that becomes a new exciting field in computer science and being applied to a number of applications areas like: mobile computing, e-commerce, information retrieval, network management and telecommunications. The power of these agents in solving complex problems is due to many characteristics. They can achieve their goals in a flexible way by using interaction with other agents on the network. However, the security issue is an obstacle to the expansion of this technology. A mobile agent can be target of several types of attacks because it moves from one network to another and from one system to another, which may not be secure. This paper aims first, in sections I and II, to describe the principal concepts of mobile agents and give a comparison between the mobile agent model and other models. Section III presents different aspects related to mobile agents security, and presents some related works. Section IV studies the use of mobile agents to enhance different systems security. Finally, the paper is concluded in Section V.