An Infrastructure for Web-Agent-based Service Providing

. Mobile agents are a new paradigm in distributed computing. In this paper we describe a platform, which supports Web agents --- mobile agents that live in web servers and communicate with users through web browsers. Our belief is that this World Wide Web scenario identifies an application area for which the mobile agent abstraction which is well-suited. We present the state of implementation, and we give an outlook on our future work. Keywords: mobile agents, service providing, World Wide Web, security, infrastructure, mobile agents application 1 Introduction `Mobile Agents' are programs that can move from computer to computer to fulfill a task on behalf a user. To overcome the problem of heterogeneity, mobile agents are mostly programmed in an interpreted language for which an interpreter is available for a wide range of computer systems. Using an interpreted language also solves, to a certain extent, one of the most important problems for mobile agent systems: security. Since the i..

Transparent migration of Java-based mobile agents (Capturing and reestabilishing the state of Java programs)

. In this paper we describe a way to save and restore the state of a running Java program. We achieve this on the language level, without modifying the Java virtual machine, by instrumenting the programmer 's original code with a preprocessor. The automatically inserted code saves the runtime information when the program requests state saving and reestablishes the program's runtime state on restart. The current preprocessor prototype is used in a mobile agent scenario to offer transparent agent migration for Java based mobile agents, but could generally be used to save and reestablish the execution state of any Java program. 1 Introduction Mobile agents are programs that can move from one host to another. These programs can initiate their own transfer by executing a special instruction in their code. To migrate an agent, some state information of the agent program has to be saved and shipped to the new destination. At the target destination the agent program is restarted. Ideally, the..

Protecting Mobile Web-Commerce Agents with Smartcards

. Mobile agents add a new communication paradigm to traditional network communication mechanisms. In contrast to the classical mechanisms like remote programming, RPC, or client-server systems, mobile agents have specific advantages when used in a heterogeneous networking environment such as the World Wide Web. So far, the pervasiveness of publicly available mobile agent platforms is not given. Offering a seamless integration of mobile agents into the widespread and well-accepted WWW environment is crucial for the success of mobile agents. One of the growing fields of interest in the Web is the area of electronic commerce. Mobile Web-commerce agents could play a prominent role in future electronic commerce scenarios, if the malicious host problem could be solved. Our paper describes the integration of mobile agents into the Web and the use of Java cards to allow a mobile agent to store and transport data securely. This should promote the usage of mobile agents for electronic commerce p..

How to Integrate Mobile Agents into Web Servers

Mobile agents are a new paradigm for communication and cooperation in distributed computing. To combine the new paradigm with the promising World Wide Web platfrom, we integrated mobile agents into Web Servers. In this way, mobile agents may travel from Web server to Web server to access their local data. The paper describes how we integrated mobile agents support into a Web server. We present the state of implementation, and we give an outlook on our future work. 1. Introduction `Mobile Agents' are programs that can move from host to host to fulfill a task on behalf a user. To overcome the problem of heterogeneity, mobile agents are mostly programmed in an interpreted language for which an interpreter is available for a wide range of computer systems. Using an interpreted language also solves, to a certain extent, one of the most important problems for mobile agent systems: security. Since the interpreter which executes the mobile agent is local to a computer system, it can be modifi..

Integrating Java-based Mobile Agents into Web Servers under Security Concerns

The paper describes a system architecture which offers the ability to host mobile agents (so-called Webagents) on a Web server. This is done by a special server extension module called 'server agent environment ' (SAE). The agents may access local data of the Web server and may communicate with other Webagents or with human users. The paper discusses the different security issues that arise in such a system and shows how we address the problems. Concerning system and network security, we present a solution based on security packages, protection domains, and agent capabilities. This provides a flexible way to restrict an agent's possibility to access the local server data or access the network. Since we also aim at providing our SAE as a plug-in for other Web servers, we show how this is supported by our system architecture. 1 Introduction The notion of 'mobile agents' commonly refers to programs that are able to move from host to host. Since the term 'agent' often implies some sort o..

Mobile Agents as an Architectural Concept for Internet-based Distributed Applications -- The Wasp Project Approach

After introducing the concept of mobile agents and potential application domains, we motivate why mobile agent technology is an interesting concept for large Internet-based system structures. We then describe the Java-based WASP agent environment which integrates agent execution platforms into WWW servers and thus promotes a world wide infrastructure for mobile agents. We sketch first prototype applications, and we mention some unique aspects of the WASP project such as fully transparent migration of Java objects. Finally we report on some experiences we gained when realizing our mobile agent system