Study of MA protection based extending inheritance hierarchy trees and time check

Abstract

Mobile agents (MA) are autonomous software entities that are able to migrate across heterogeneous network execution environments. Mobility and autonomy compensate the deficiencies of distributed technology pretty well. But the security issues with mobile agents have not been solved and are becoming obstacles for the application of mobile agents. Obfuscation is a technique by applying a behavior transformation to the mobile code before sending it to run on different platforms. This paper presents a protection scheme of combining obfuscation and time checking technology. Extending inheritance hierarchy tree and false restructure methods are adopted in the obfuscation technology. The combining protection scheme is tested in actual network management environment, which can effectively identify the malicious host.