A modularized electronic payment system for agent-based e-commerce

With the explosive growth of the Internet, electronic-commerce (e-commerce) is an increasingly important segment of commercial activities on the web. The Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution & Roaming (SAFER) architecture was proposed to further facilitate e-commerce using agent technology. In this paper, the electronic payment aspect of SAFER will be explored. The Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol and E-Cash were selected as the bases for the electronic payment system implementation. The various modules of the payment system and how they interface with each other are shown. An extensible implementation done using JavaTM will also be elaborated. This application incorporates agent roaming functionality and the ability to conduct e-commerce transactions and carry out intelligent e-payment procedures

A multi-agent architecture for electronic payment

The Internet has brought about innumerable changes to the way enterprises do business. An essential problem to be solved before the widespread commercial use of the Internet is to provide a trustworthy solution for electronic payment. We propose a multi-agent mediated electronic payment architecture in this paper. It is aimed at providing an agent-based approach to accommodate multiple e-payment schemes. Through a layered design of the payment structure and a well-defined uniform payment interface, the architecture shows good scalability. When a new e-payment scheme or implementation is available, it can be plugged into the framework easily. In addition, we construct a framework allowing multiple agents to work cooperatively to realize automation of electronic payment. A prototype has been built to illustrate the functionality of this design. Finally we discuss the security issues

Securing mobile agent in hostile environment.

by Mo Chun Man.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-80).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Chapter 1 --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- The Mobile Agents --- p.2Chapter 1.2 --- The Mobile Agent Paradigm --- p.4Chapter 1.2.1 --- Initiatives --- p.5Chapter 1.2.2 --- Applications --- p.7Chapter 1.3 --- The Mobile Agent S ystem --- p.8Chapter 1.4 --- Security in Mobile Agent System --- p.9Chapter 1.5 --- Thesis Organization --- p.11Chapter 2 --- BACKGROUND AND FOUNDATIONS --- p.12Chapter 2.1 --- Encryption/Decryption --- p.12Chapter 2.2 --- One-way Hash Function --- p.13Chapter 2.3 --- Message Authentication Code (MAC) --- p.13Chapter 2.4 --- Homomorphic Encryption Scheme --- p.14Chapter 2.5 --- One-Round Oblivious Transfer --- p.14Chapter 2.6 --- Polynomial-time Algorithms --- p.14Chapter 2.7 --- Circuit --- p.15Chapter 3 --- SURVEY OF PROTECTION SCHEMES ON MOBILE AGENTS --- p.16Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.16Chapter 3.2 --- Detection Approaches --- p.17Chapter 3.2.1 --- Execution Traces --- p.17Chapter 3.2.2 --- Partial Result Encapsulation --- p.18Chapter 3.2.3 --- State Appraisal --- p.20Chapter 3.3 --- Prevention Approaches --- p.20Chapter 3.3.1 --- Sliding Encryption --- p.20Chapter 3.3.2 --- Tamper-resistant Hardware --- p.21Chapter 3.3.3 --- Multi-agent Cooperation --- p.22Chapter 3.3.4 --- Code Obfuscation --- p.23Chapter 3.3.5 --- Intention Spreading and Shrinking --- p.26Chapter 3.3.6 --- Encrypted Function Evaluation --- p.26Chapter 3.3.7 --- Black Box Test Prevention --- p.27Chapter 3.4 --- Chapter Summary --- p.29Chapter 4 --- TAXONOMY OF ATTACKS --- p.30Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.30Chapter 4.2 --- Whatis attack? --- p.31Chapter 4.3 --- How can attacks be done? --- p.32Chapter 4.4 --- Taxonomy of Attacks --- p.33Chapter 4.4.1 --- Purposeful Attack --- p.33Chapter 4.4.2 --- Frivolous Attack --- p.36Chapter 4.4.3 --- The Full Taxonomy --- p.38Chapter 4.5 --- Using the Taxonomy --- p.38Chapter 4.5.1 --- Match to Existing Protection Schemes --- p.38Chapter 4.5.2 --- Insight to Potential Protection Schemes --- p.41Chapter 4.6 --- Chapter Summary --- p.42Chapter 5 --- PROTECTION FOR REACTIVE MOBILE AGENTS --- p.43Chapter 5.1 --- Introduction --- p.43Chapter 5.2 --- The Model --- p.45Chapter 5.2.1 --- The Non-reactive and Reactive Mobile Agent Model --- p.45Chapter 5.2.2 --- The Computation Flow --- p.47Chapter 5.2.3 --- An Example --- p.49Chapter 5.3 --- tools --- p.51Chapter 5.3.1 --- Encrypted Circuit Construction --- p.51Chapter 5.3.2 --- Circuit Cascading --- p.53Chapter 5.4 --- Proposed Protection Scheme --- p.54Chapter 5.4.1 --- Two-hop Protocol --- p.55Chapter 5.4.2 --- Multi-hop Protocol --- p.60Chapter 5.5 --- Security Analysis --- p.60Chapter 5.5.1 --- Security under Purposeful Attacks --- p.61Chapter 5.5.2 --- Security under Frivolous Attacks --- p.62Chapter 5.6 --- Improvements --- p.62Chapter 5.6.1 --- Basic Idea --- p.63Chapter 5.6.2 --- Input Retrieval Protocol --- p.63Chapter 5.6.3 --- Combating Frivolous Attacks --- p.65Chapter 5.7 --- Further Considerations --- p.66Chapter 5.8 --- Chapter Summary --- p.67Chapter 6 --- CONCLUSIONS --- p.68APPENDIX --- p.71BIBLIOGRAPHY --- p.7

Mobile distributed authentication protocol

Networks access control is a crucial topic and authentication is a pre-requisite of that process. Most existing authentication protocols (for example that used in the GSM mobile network) are centralised. Depending on a single entity is undesirable as it has security, trust and availability issues. This paper proposes a new protocol, GSM-secure network access protocol (G-SNAP). In G-SNAP, the authentication procedure and network access control is handled by a quorum of authentication centres. The advantages of the novel protocol include increased security, availability and distributed trust

Efficient Micro-Mobility using Intra-domain Multicast-based Mechanisms (M&M)

One of the most important metrics in the design of IP mobility protocols is the handover performance. The current Mobile IP (MIP) standard has been shown to exhibit poor handover performance. Most other work attempts to modify MIP to slightly improve its efficiency, while others propose complex techniques to replace MIP. Rather than taking these approaches, we instead propose a new architecture for providing efficient and smooth handover, while being able to co-exist and inter-operate with other technologies. Specifically, we propose an intra-domain multicast-based mobility architecture, where a visiting mobile is assigned a multicast address to use while moving within a domain. Efficient handover is achieved using standard multicast join/prune mechanisms. Two approaches are proposed and contrasted. The first introduces the concept proxy-based mobility, while the other uses algorithmic mapping to obtain the multicast address of visiting mobiles. We show that the algorithmic mapping approach has several advantages over the proxy approach, and provide mechanisms to support it. Network simulation (using NS-2) is used to evaluate our scheme and compare it to other routing-based micro-mobility schemes - CIP and HAWAII. The proactive handover results show that both M&M and CIP shows low handoff delay and packet reordering depth as compared to HAWAII. The reason for M&M's comparable performance with CIP is that both use bi-cast in proactive handover. The M&M, however, handles multiple border routers in a domain, where CIP fails. We also provide a handover algorithm leveraging the proactive path setup capability of M&M, which is expected to outperform CIP in case of reactive handover.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure