Mobile Agent Protection in E-Business Application A Dynamic Adaptability Based Approach

Abstract

The applications of mobile agent technology are various and include electronic commerce, personal assistance, parallel processing ... The use of mobile agent paradigm provides several advantages. Unfortunately, it has introduced some problems. Security represents an important issue. Current researches efforts in the area of mobile agent security follow two aspects: (i) protection of the hosts from malicious mobile agents, (ii) protection of the mobile agent from malevolent hosts. This paper focuses on the second point. It deals with the protection of mobile agent from eavesdropping attacks. The proposed approach is based on a dynamic adaptability policy supported by a reflexive architecture. The idea relies on the fact that mobile agent behave differently and in unforeseeable manner during its life cycle. This ability complicates analysis attempts and protects it. In order to show the feasibility of the proposed security strategy, we propose to illustrate it through an e-business application, implemented in Java language using Jade platform.