Security extension to grasshopper for network management based policy

Abstract

Mobile agent technology provides a promising means for the management of the large-scaled network, such as the Internet. But it also results in significant security threats to and from both malicious agents and hosts. Based on the analysis of the security threats that may occur during the mobile agent based network management applications, This work presents a security extension to a mobile agent system Grasshopper, and describes the main component of the extension: Mobile Agent Security Facility (MASF), MASF has several key features: 1) a secure mechanism for dispatching agents to given domains or network elements from secured agent repository; 2) provision of encrypted communication; 3) a safe mobile agents execution environment that gives mobile agents different resource access permissions according to the result of authentication and authorization; 4) logging services to record security relevant events. MASF architecture is further integrated and verified in a practical network management application: inter-domain IP VPN configuration. MASF is generic and can be used in other mobile agent applications.