Transactional Agents for Pervasive Computing

Pervasive computing enables seamless integration of computing technology into everyday life to make upto- date information and services proactively available to the users based on their needs and behaviors. We aim to develop a transaction management scheme as a pertinent component for such environment supported by either structured or ad hoc networks. We propose Transactional Agents for Pervasive COmputing (TAPCO), which utilizes a dynamic hierarchical meta data structure that captures the semantic contents of the underlying heterogeneous data sources. Mobile agents process the transactions collaboratively, to preserve ACID properties without violating local autonomy of the data sources. TAPCO is simulated and compared against Decentralized Serialization Graph Testing (DSGT) protocol. The results show that TAPCO outperforms DSGT in several ways. In contrast to DSGT that did not consider local transactions, TAPCO supports both local and global transactions without violating the local autonomy

ABADAM: un Modelo de Seguridad para el Acceso a Bases de Datos Utilizando Agentes Móviles

This article analyze aspects related to the mobile agents and security problems these entail, presenting a model access to databases that allow in a high degree to improve the response times in the network and to create a security model that collaborates with user’s authentication process. The proposed model has denominated ABADAM (Access to Databases using Mobile Agents), ABADAM was implemented using: the Java programming language, API Aglets and MS-SQL Server. ABADAM offers a high level of security to protect the database server from malicious agents attacks, allowing access to the valid agents only. The security is based fundamentally on the authentication or identification process of agents that arrive to the server, this process will be able to detect non-valid agents and it will eliminate when considering them malicious agents. In addition if some ill-disposed user created a mobile agent with login and password valid will not be able to make the authentication when it will not be carrying the credential that credits it as a reliable agent and it would be destroyed immediately.En este artículo se analizan aspectos concernientes a los agentes móviles y los problemas de seguridad que estos conllevan, presentando un modelo o esquema para acceder a una base de datos que permita mejorar los tiempos de respuestas en la red y crear un modelo de seguridad que colabore en el proceso de autenticación de los usuarios. El modelo propuesto se ha denominado ABADAM (Acceso a BAses de Datos utilizando Agentes Móviles), ABADAM se implementó utilizando: el lenguaje de programación Java, la API Aglets y MS-SQL Server. ABADAM brinda un alto nivel de seguridad para proteger al servidor de base de datos de ataques de agentes maliciosos, permitiendo el acceso solo a los agentes válidos. La seguridad está basada fundamentalmente en el proceso de autenticación o identificación de los agentes que lleguen al servidor, este proceso será capaz de detectar agentes no válidos y los eliminará al con- siderarlos agentes maliciosos. Además si algún usuario mal intencionado creara un agente móvil con login y password válidos no podrá realizar la autenticación al no portar la credencial que lo acredite como un agente confiable y sería destruido inmediatamente