Platform independent non blocking mechanism for prevention of blocking attacks in mobile agents based e-service applications

Abstract

In recent years many researchers are incorporating the mobile agents in e-service applications especially in e-learning and e-commerce to improve the network latency and to reduce the network traffic. On the other side, the security issues degrade the mobile agent usage. The main intention of the attacker is to kill or modify the behaviour of the agent in the middle of the journey to degrade the trustiness of the agent environment. In this paper, we propose fault tolerance mechanism for preventing the agent blocking in scenarios where the agent is captured by malicious host in the network. This approach makes use of acknowledgements and partial result retrieval and when implemented in mobile agent platform allows the originator to retrieve partial results and track the location of mobile agent at any time during the process of transaction execution. During the recovery of the mobile agent all the components (agent code, itinerary, credential information, collected information and state) are able to recover. The proposed mechanism is capable of improving fault tolerant time, reliability and performance, especially for mobile agents in e-commerce Internet applications.