A secure approach for mobile agent migration control

Abstract

The mobile agent paradigm is a promising technology for smart e-commerce of the next generation. However, security-related issues must be satisfactorily solved before they come into full commercial use. We propose a secure approach for mobile agent migration control based on passport and visa (P/V). P/V as up-to-date digital credentials not only serve the agent-host authentication purpose, but also can be used by hosts to trace the agent route and by communities to control the migration of mobile agents. The binding scheme further provides a way to protect these digital credentials and eliminate the misuse of them on illegal agents. We discuss the design issues in detail and evaluate the implementation of the proposed system. © 2002 IEEE.