Securing mobile agents by integrity-based encryption

Abstract

The mobile agent paradigm is an important and promising technology to structure distributed applications. Since the mobile agent physically moves to a remote host that is under the control of a different principal, it needs to be protected from this environment which is responsible for its execution. This problem constitutes the major difficulty for using the mobile agent paradigm for privacy protection and is explored in great detail. In this paper, we provide the methodology of protecting the mobile agents from unauthorized modification for the program code or data by malicious hosts. One important technique is an integrity-based encryption, by which a mobile agent, while running on the remote host, checks itself to verify that it has not been modified and conceals some privacy sensitive parts of the mobile agent