A trustworthy mobile agent infrastructure for network management

Despite several advantages inherent in mobile-agent-based approaches to network management as compared to traditional SNMP-based approaches, industry is reluctant to adopt the mobile agent paradigm as a replacement for the existing manager-agent model; the management community requires an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary, use of mobile agents. Furthermore, security for distributed management is a major concern; agent-based management systems inherit the security risks of mobile agents. We have developed a Java-based mobile agent infrastructure for network management that enables the safe integration of mobile agents with the SNMP protocol. The security of the system has been evaluated under agent to agent-platform and agent to agent attacks and has proved trustworthy in the performance of network management tasks

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

D’Agents: Security in a Multiple-Language, Mobile-Agent System

Abstract. Mobile-agent systems must address three security issues: protecting an individual machine, protecting a group of machines, and protecting an agent. In this chapter, we discuss these three issues in the context of D’Agents, a mobile-agent system whose agents can be written in Tcl, Java and Scheme. (D’Agents was formerly known as Agent Tcl.) First we discuss mechanisms existing in D’Agents for protecting an individual machine: (1) cryptographic authentication of the agent’s owner, (2) resource managers that make policy decisions based on the owner’s identity, and (3) secure execution environments for each language that enforce the decisions of the resource managers. Then we discuss our planned market-based approach for protecting machine groups. Finally we consider several (partial) solutions for protecting an agent from a malicious machine.