Secure Mobile Agents in Electronic Commerce by Using Undetachable Signatures from Pairings

It is expect that mobile agents technology will bring significant benefits to electronic commerce. But security issues, especially threats from malicious hosts, become a great obstacle of widespread deployment of applications in electronic commerce based on mobile agents technology. Undetachable digital signature is a category of digital signatures to secure mobile agents against malicious hosts. An undetachable signature scheme by using encrypted functions from bilinear pairings was proposed in this paper. The security of this scheme base on the computational intractability of discrete logarithm problem and computational Diffe-Hellman problem on gap Diffle-Hellman group. Furthermore, the scheme satisfies all the requirements of a strong non-designated proxy signature i.e. verifiability, strong unforgeability, strong identifiability, strong undeniability and preventions of misuse. An undetachable threshold signature scheme that enable the customer to provide n mobile agents with ‘shares’ of the undetachable signature function is also provided. It is able to provide more reliability than classical undetachable signatures

Secure e-transactions using mobile agents with agent broker

This paper presents an e-transactions protocol using mobile agents. However, when mobile agents travel to a number of servers for searching optimal purchase for the underlying customer, the mobile codes should be protected. We integrate a secure signature algorithm with the e-transaction algorithm to maintain the security. In addition, an agent broker is involved in the algorithm that will help to reduce the communications among the mobile agents, the customer, and the servers. We have presented security and privacy analysis for the proposed protocol

Secure electronic commerce with mobile agents

Online transactions using mobile agents need secure protocols to help the mobile agents to accomplish the transactions initiated by a client in an electronic commerce. However, the mobile agent could encounter hostile environment. For example, a server may compromise the mobile agent and try to obtain private information of the client. A solution to tackle this issue has been proposed. However, the existing solution is implemented using RSA signatures that result in long signatures and heavy workloads for the mobile agent. Mobile agents will migrate from the client to a server and from one server to other servers in order to accomplish the client?s transaction plan. Therefore, it will be interesting to re-tackle this issue. We present a new scheme for secure transactions using mobile agents in potentially hostile environments. This transaction scheme is implemented by using a new undetachable signature scheme. The new undetachable signature protocol utilizes short signatures, which is desirable for low-bandwidth and efficient mobile communications

Secure agent data integrity shield

In the rapidly expanding field of E-Commerce, mobile agent is the emerging technology that addresses the requirement of intelligent filtering/processing of information. This paper will address the area of mobile agent data integrity protection. We propose the use of Secure Agent Data Integrity Shield (SADIS) as a scheme that protects the integrity of data collected during agent roaming. With the use of a key seed negotiation protocol and integrity protection protocol, SADIS protects the secrecy as well as the integrity of agent data. Any illegal data modification, deletion, or insertion can be detected either by the subsequent host or the agent butler. Most important of all, the identity of each malicious host can be established. To evaluate the feasibility of our design, a prototype has been developed using Java. The result of benchmarking shows improvement both in terms of data and time efficiency

Multi-agent system security for mobile communication

This thesis investigates security in multi-agent systems for mobile communication. Mobile as well as non-mobile agent technology is addressed. A general security analysis based on properties of agents and multi-agent systems is presented along with an overview of security measures applicable to multi-agent systems, and in particular to mobile agent systems. A security architecture, designed for deployment of agent technology in a mobile communication environment, is presented. The security architecture allows modelling of interactions at all levels within a mobile communication system. This architecture is used as the basis for describing security services and mechanisms for a multi-agent system. It is shown how security mechanisms can be used in an agent system, with emphasis on secure agent communication. Mobile agents are vulnerable to attacks from the hosts on which they are executing. Two methods for dealing with threats posed by malicious hosts to a trading agent are presented. The rst approach uses a threshold scheme and multiple mobile agents to minimise the eect of malicious hosts. The second introduces trusted nodes into the infrastructure. Undetachable signatures have been proposed as a way to limit the damage a malicious host can do by misusing a signature key carried by a mobile agent. This thesis proposes an alternative scheme based on conventional signatures and public key certicates. Threshold signatures can be used in a mobile agent scenario to spread the risk between several agents and thereby overcome the threats posed by individual malicious hosts. An alternative to threshold signatures, based on conventional signatures, achieving comparable security guarantees with potential practical advantages compared to a threshold scheme is proposed in this thesis. Undetachable signatures and threshold signatures are both concepts applicable to mobile agents. This thesis proposes a technique combining the two schemes to achieve undetachable threshold signatures. This thesis denes the concept of certicate translation, which allows an agent to have one certicate translated into another format if so required, and thereby save storage space as well as being able to cope with a certicate format not foreseen at the time the agent was created

Secure transactions using mobile agents with TTP

Electronic commerce has pushed and benefited from the development of mobile agents technology. One of the reasons is electronic commerce needs remote searching and negotiating between one customer and a number of E-shops. Mobile agents can travel over the Intranet or Internet. Therefore, mobile agents can help the customer or E-shops with remote searching and negotiating. However, because of the heterogeneousness of the networks the mobile agents migrate to, security issues should be tackled with cautions. This paper presents a new secure electronic commerce protocol. The underlying transactions are accomplished with mobile agents. A trusted third party (in fact, a trusted authority) is involved in the protocol

A survey of security issue in multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems have attracted the attention of researchers because of agents' automatic, pro-active, and dynamic problem solving behaviors. Consequently, there has been a rapid development in agent technology which has enabled us to provide or receive useful and convenient services in a variety of areas such as banking, transportation, e-business, and healthcare. In many of these services, it is, however, necessary that security is guaranteed. Unless we guarantee the security services based on agent-based systems, these services will face significant deployment problems. In this paper, we survey existing work related to security in multi-agent systems, especially focused on access control and trust/reputation, and then present our analyses. We also present existing problems and discuss future research challenges. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V 2011

Strong proxy signature scheme with proxy signer privacy protection.

by Shum Kwan.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 30-32).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Acknowledgement --- p.iiAbstract --- p.iii□ □ --- p.ivChapter 1 . --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Introduction to topic --- p.1Chapter 1.2 --- What is proxy signature? --- p.2Chapter 1.3 --- Terminologies in proxy signature --- p.2Chapter 1.4 --- Levels of delegation --- p.3Chapter 1.5 --- Previous work on Proxy Signature --- p.4Chapter 1.6 --- Our Contributions --- p.4Chapter 1.7 --- Thesis Organization --- p.4Chapter 2. --- Backgroun d --- p.6Chapter 2.1 --- Digital Signature --- p.6Chapter 2.2 --- Digital Certificate and CA --- p.6Chapter 2.3 --- Hash Functions --- p.7Chapter 2.4 --- Bit commitment --- p.7Chapter 3. --- Brief introduction to Our Result --- p.8Chapter 3.1 --- A Proxy Signature Scheme with Proxy Signer Privacy Protection --- p.8Chapter 3.2 --- Applications of Proxy Signature --- p.9Chapter 4. --- Detail Explanation of Certified Alias and its Application on Proxy Signature --- p.10Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.10Chapter 4.2 --- Protecting Signer Privacy Using Certified Alias Definition 4.2.3 --- p.10Chapter 4.3 --- Constructing Proxy signature Scheme by Consecutive Execution of Cryptographic Primitives (Scheme CE) --- p.11Chapter 4.4 --- Constructing Proxy signature Scheme by Direct Form Equations (Scheme DF) --- p.15Chapter 4.5 --- Comparison between scheme CE and scheme DF --- p.19Chapter 4.6 --- Chapter Summary --- p.20Chapter 5 . --- Applications of Proxy Signature with Proxy Signer Privacy Protection --- p.21Chapter 5.1 --- Secure Mobile agent Signature with Itinerary Privacy --- p.21Chapter 5.1.1 --- Introduction to Mobile Agent --- p.21Chapter 5.1.2 --- "Review on Lee, et al. strong non-designated proxy signature scheme for mobile agents" --- p.21Chapter 5.1.3 --- Constructing Signature scheme for Mobile Agent using Proxy signature with Proxy Signer Privacy Protection --- p.22Chapter 5.1.4 --- Remarks --- p.23Chapter 5.2 --- Group Signature with Unlimited Group Size --- p.24Chapter 5.2.1 --- Introduction to group signature --- p.24Chapter 5.2.2 --- Constructing group signature scheme using certified alias --- p.24Chapter 5.2.4 --- Remarks --- p.26Chapter 5.3 --- Chapter Summary --- p.27Chapter 6. --- Conclusions --- p.28Appendix: Paper derived from this thesis --- p.29Bibliography --- p.3

Secret sharing for mobile agent cryptography

A mobile agent is a multi-threaded autonomous program that can be distributed over a heterogeneous network to perform some predefined task for its hum an creator (user). The independence, flexibility and autonomy offered by the mobile agent paradigm hold many promises for the future of distributed computing [18]. However, for an agent to be autonomous, it must carry its code, states and results from host to host. Since an agent executes on remote potentially hostile environments, hiding information from hosts has proven to be a tough challenge. This thesis introduces two novel ideas th at can be used in the mobile agent paradigm. First, is the use of Shamir’s [33] (f, n)-threshold secret sharing scheme for the distribution of the private key of a public/private key pair amongst n agents. Thus giving an agent the ability to use cryptographic primitives for protection of intermediate results obtained from previously visited hosts. An agent can use the public key for encryption while the private key is safely shared between the agent and its siblings. Second, a “cookie” will be introduced as an tool for avoiding agent collisions. Analogous to cookies used by web browsers for tracking of visitors to a site, it will be used as a tool for marking previously visited hosts. The goal of marking previously visited hosts is to resolve the problem of agent collisions. Agent collisions occurs when a group of agents from the same originator with the same purpose visits a particular host more than once