A framework for the protection of mobile agents against malicious hosts

The mobility attribute of a mobile agent implies deployment thereof in untrustworthy environments, which introduces malicious host threats. The research question deals with how a security framework could be constructed to address the mentioned threats without introducing high costs or restraining the mobile agent's autonomy or performance. Available literature have been studied, analysed and discussed. The salient characteristics as well as the drawbacks of current solutions were isolated. Through this knowledge a dynamic mobile agent security framework was defined. The framework is based on the definition of multiple security levels, depending on type of deployment environment and type of application. A prototype was constructed and tested and it was found to be lightweight and efficient, giving developers insight into possible security threats as well as tools for maximum protection against malicious hosts. The framework outperformed other frameworks / models as it provides dynamic solutions without burdening a system with unnecessary security gadgets and hence paying for it in system cost and performanceComputingD.Phil

AZIMAs - Almost Zero Infrastructure Mobile Agent System

Mobile agents promise to bring in a new era in the field of World Wide Web and Internet computing. Although mobile agents have been around for sometime their full potential has not been realized due to the lack of a suitable infrastructure that would allow for their deployment and seamless integration on the Internet. In this paper we propose a system based on HTTP and existing Web server that facilitates the deployment of Java based mobile agents on the Internet. By requiring no more than Web servers as the mobile agent's environment, it will be possible to overcome the current hurdles and make mobile agents a pervasive model for Internet computing. In this paper, we present aZIMAs, a simple mobile agent environment and a potentially ubiquitous server platform. © 2002 IEEE

aZIMAS:Web mobile agent system

Mobile Agents technology opens up new avenues in personalizing and customizing the web experience of users. It provides new possibilities for deploying distributed applications using existing web infrastructure. One of the reasons why mobile agents are not yet popular on the web is due to the lack of an easily deployable framework that would facilitate their existence. Existing mobile agent systems usually require heavy infrastructure that lacks interoperability if deployed on the Internet. In this paper, we describe aZIMAS (almost Zero Infrastructure Mobile Agent System) – a framework that will enable the execution of lightweight mobile agents on the Internet and remove some of the constraints imposed by existing systems. aZIMAS uses existing platform independent protocols like HTTP to achieve code mobility and agent interaction. Our approach involves adding a minimal infrastructure layer, called Agent Environment (AE), over existing web servers and using web browsers as clients. By basing our framework firmly on existing web servers and browsers, we hope to leverage the pervasiveness of web browsers and servers and achieve similar pervasiveness for mobile agents. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002

Internet agents for effective collaboration

With the ever-growing Internet, distributed applications are gaining popularity. Going “online” to browse, to send/receive emails is an integral part of our daily lives. In fact, the majority of Internet users rely on email and web browsers as the de-facto tools for collaboration. Such popular tools, however, provide limited and inefficient mechanisms for collaboration, especially when several collaborators and resources are involved. Surprisingly, collaboration tools such as NetMeeting and Netscape Collabra are only used in limited applications despite their rich collaboration support. What is lacking is an invisible infrastructure that extends email and web browsing tools – to which most Internet users are accustomed and addicted – to intuitive interfaces of a full-fledged Web collaboration system. In this paper we present WAPM, a Web Agent Programming Model that uses mobile agents as the tool for coordination and describes a model that uses familiar tools such as the web and email for effective asynchronous collaboration. We introduce WAPM and give details of a simple scripting language used to direct agent actions, a pre-processor to check the validity of the script, an agent manager that creates and manages agents according to the script and a defined class hierarchy for developing application agents in WAPM. The mobile agents are based on the aZIMAs (almost Zero Infrastructure Mobile Agents) system that integrates mobile agents with web servers by providing mobility using HT. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002