Mobile Agent Authentication Research Articles

An efficient secure detection and prevention of malevolent nodes with lightweight surprise check scheme using trusted mobile agents in mobile ad-hoc networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks are a type of self-configuring networks in which the node moves from one location to another without any fixed infrastructure. Providing security in mobile ad-hoc networks is a challenging task due to its frequent topology change. Protecting legitimate nodes from the malevolent nodes is an important factor. To solve this problem, we propose trusted agent-based lightweight surprise check for malevolent node detection in mobile ad-hoc networks. This scheme uses three phases: lightweight surprise check manager, cluster formation and mobile agent phase. Lightweight surprise check manager detects the malevolent node based on node forward rate, node acknowledgement, secure communication and node location. In cluster phase, the clusters are formed depending upon received signal strength and the cluster heads are elected based on the residual energy and utility of neighbors. In mobile agent phase, the secret key method is used to verify the mobile agent authentication. The mobile agent is used for data communication among cluster head to destination, thus it reduces the energy utilization, network overload, average delay as well as improve the network efficiency in the network. Simulation results shows that the lightweight surprise check scheme provides improved security and quality of service compared to the existing schemes.

Mobile agent based secure internet business using access key hierarchy management scheme

To access the distributed web applications in a computer network, mobile agents have long been proved to be a successful tool. The power of a mobile agent lies in migrating to the destination hosts directly for retrieving the information under consideration. Since many businesses run their sensitive data in distributed servers, it has been a mandatory demand that before the information is downloaded, the mobile agents need to be authenticated and authorized. To provide such authentication, digital signatures based on well known algorithms such as RSA, ECC have been proposed in the past. The main drawback of these works is that the they are not computationally efficient during the encryption and decryption of keys which are used to encrypt and decrypt the content. Thus, the major contribution of our work is to reduce the computational complexity for the authentication of mobile agents through a new hierarchical access management scheme. The computational costs are reduced during the key derivation and signature verification processes. The proposed work not only reduces the computational time, but provides flexibility to give fine grained access to the mobile agents to access only the authorized files. Extensive simulations prove that our approach significantly reduces the computational overhead than the recent works in the literature and hence this approach is best suited for implementation in the distributed web environments.

Multi-Agent based Framework for Secure and Reliable Communication among Open Clouds

Cloud Computing (CC) is an emerging field of Information Technology. CC environment completely relies on the perception of utility, service-oriented, cluster and grid computing. The idea of virtualization discriminates CC from other fields . CC environment provides better, reliable, and scalable services. Since clouds are working independently smooth, but standalone, cloud operation is complex. Therefore the need of interoperability and portability with other clouds come into play which increases the scope of the cloud environment. Then, the security threats are increased in the cloud environments. In order to address the problem, a Secure Multi-Agent based framework for Communication among Open Clouds is proposed in this paper. In the framework, each cloud has a secure Mobile Agent which is responsible of the secure communication among clouds. Thus, authentication of Mobile Agents is performed by the Directory Agent. Directory agents are included in order to avoid the joining malicious or attacker mobile agents into the cloud. The theoretical and practical results show that Multi-agent based framework is more reliable and secure than other cloud environments.

A Secure Mobile Agents Platform

Mobile Agents is a new paradigm for distributed computing where security is very essential to the acceptance of this paradigm in a large scale distributed environment. In this paper, we propose protection mechanisms for mobile agents. In these mechanisms, the authentication of mobile agents and the access control to the system resources are controlled by the mobile-agents platform. Each agent defines its own access control policy with regard to other agents using an Interface Definition Language (IDL), thus enforcing modularity and easing programming task. An evaluation of these mechanisms has been conducted. The measurements give the overhead involved by the proposed protection mechanisms to the performance of mobile agents. An important advantage of our protection mechanisms are transparency to agents and the portability of nonsecure applications onto a secure environment. A mobile agent system and the protection mechanisms have been implemented. Our experiments have shown the feasibility and the advantages of our mechanisms.