Mobile Agent Security based on Code Obfuscation and Locator Mechanism

Abstract

Mobile agent is a software program comprising of decision making code and data that have the potential to migrate from one node to another node in a network. A mobile agent works on behalf of the owner who created it. Mobile agent operates in a distributed environment in which agents with specific functionalities roam in the network to execute a task in the target hosts. Mobile agent systems are more efficient compared to client server architecture, because they help in reducing network traffic to a larger extent. Mobile agents being vulnerable to various threats and attacks on the network are a major concern in this system. In a non trusted environment, care should be taken to protect the mobile agent from getting tampered. Existing work on mobile agent systems with different mechanisms doesn't provide complete security. In this paper a trust model is proposed with code obfuscation and frequent monitoring of mobile agents using locator mechanism along with data encryption which helps in protecting the data and code which agent carries, thus providing an additional layer of security.

References

• W. Jansen, "Countermeasures for mobile agent security", Computer Communication, Special issue on Advances in Research and Application of Network Security, November 2000.
• Danny B. Lange and Mitsuru Oshima. Seven Good Reasons for Mobile Agents. Communications of the ACM, 42(3):88–89, March 1999.
• WANG Ru-Chuan, HU Tao, XU Xiao-Iong, "Research in to mobile agent security", Joumal of Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Volume 16, Issue 3, pp. 81-86, 2004.
• Zhidong Shen, Xiaoping Wu, "A Trusted Computing Technology Enabled Mobile Agent System", Proceedings of International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering, pp. 567-570,2008.
• Lukasz N, Marcin P, Michal R, "Mobile agent security", Thomas edition, Information assurance and computer security, lOS press, pp. l02-123,2006.
• Ibharalu F. T. , Sofoluwe A. B. , Akinwale A. T. , "A reliable protection architecture for mobile agents in open network system", International journal of computer applications, Volume 17, Issue 7, pp. 6-14, 2011.
• Ahmed Sameh Mohamed, Dalia Fakery, "SECURITY in MOBILE AGENT SYSTEMS," Applications and the Internet, IEEE/IPSJ Inter- national Symposium on, p. 4, 2002 Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT'02), 2002
• Sreedevi, R. N. ; Geeta, U. N. ; Kulkarni, U. P. ; Yardi, A. R. ; , "Enhancing Mobile Agent Applications with Security and Fault Tolerant Capabilities," Advance Computing Conference, 2009. IACC 2009. IEEE International, vol. , no. , pp. 992-996, 6-7 March 2009
• Qi Zhang, Yi Mu, Minjie Zhang, Robert Huijie Deng, "Secure Mobile Agents with Designated Hosts," Network and System Security, Interna- tional Conference on, pp. 286-293, 2009 Third International Conference on Network and System Security, 2009
• M. Gnanasekar and V. Ramachandran, "Distributed cryptographic key management for mobile agent security", International journal of recent trends in engineering, Volume I, Issue I, pp. 164-167, 2009.
• Nisha P, Sunil Kumar, Ashu B, "Security on mobile agent based crawler", International journal of computer applications, Volume I, Issue IS, pp. 5-11, 2010.
• Danny B. Lange and Mitsuru Oshima, (1998). "Mobile agents with Java: The Aglet API", Programming and Deploying JavaTM Mobile Agents with Aglets, Addison-Wesley Professional, 1998.
• Luca Ferrari, "The Aglets 2. 0. 2 User's Manual", October 2004.
• Java Programming Concepts From The Tutorial, http://java. sun. com/docs/books/tutorial/java/index. html.
• R. L. Rivest, A. Shamir, And L. Adleman, "A Method For Obtaining Digital Signatures And Public-Key Cryptosystems", February 1978 Communications of the ACM, Volume 21 Issue 2.
• C. Collgerg, C. Thomborson and D. Low, "A Taxonomy of Obfuscating Transformations", Department of computer Science, The university of Auckland, New Zealand, Technical Report #148.
• W. Jansen and T. Karygiannis, "Mobile Agent Security ", Nist Special Publication 800-19 -, 2000. National Institute of Standards Technology.
• Joris Claessens, Bart Preneel, Joos Vandewalle , "(How) Can Mobile Agents Do Secure Electronic Transactions On Untrusted Hosts? A Survey Of The Security Issues and The Current Solutions", pp. 38-41, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Vol. 3, No. 1, February 2003.
• William M. Farmer, Joshua D. Guttman, and Vipin Swarup, "Security for Mobile Agents: Authentication and State Appraisal", pp. 5-11, European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS).
• T. Sander and C. F. Tschudin, "Protecting Mobile Agents Against Malicious Hosts". G. Vigna, editor, Mobile Agents and Security, volume 1419 of LNCS, pp. 44–60. Springer-Verlag, June 1998.
• T. W. How, H. Y. Chen and M. H. Tsai, "Three Control Flow Obfuscation Methods For Java Software", The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2006, IEE Proceedings online no. 20050010.
• Vijil, E. C. Security Issues in Mobile Agent. Indian Institute of Technology. 2002.
• Zwierko, A. , Kotulski, Z. Integrity of Mobile Agents: A new Approach. International Journal of Network Security 4(2) : 2007. 201-211
• Bellavista, P. , A. Corradi, C. Federici, R. Montanari, and D. Tibaldi, Security for Mobile Agents: Issues and Challenges, chapter in "Handbook of Mobile Computing" (2004).
• Antonopoulos, N. , K. Koukoumpetsos, and K. Ahmad, A Distributed Access Control Architecture for Mobile Agents, Proc. of Intl Network Conference, Plymouth, UK, July 2000.
• Niklas Borselius, (2002). "Mobile agent security", Mobile VCE Research Group Information Security Group, Royal Holloway, University of London Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, UK.
• Shilpa Budhkar, Anshita Mishra, Ferdous A. Barbhuiya, Sukumar Nandi "Security in Mobile Agent Systems with Locator Mechanism" 1st Int'l Conf. on Recent Advances in Information Technology | RAIT-2012 | Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati Guwahati, India, 781039
• N. Borselius, Mobile agent security, Electronics & Communication Engineering Journal, October 2002, Volume 14, no 5, IEE, London, UK, pp 211-218
• Owen Arden Michael D. George Jed Liu K. Vikram Aslan Askarov Andrew C. Myers "Sharing Mobile Code Securely With Information Flow Control "2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
• M. Vigilson Prem S. Swamynathan paper "Securing Mobile Agent and its Platform from Passive Attack of Malicious Mobile Agents" IEEE-International Conference On Advances In Engineering, Science And Management (ICAESM -2012) March 30, 31, 2012
• Kristian Schelderup1, Jon Ølnes1 paper "Mobile Agent Security – Issues and Directions "
• Dave Singel´ee, Bart Preneelin their article "Secure e-commerce using mobile agents on untrusted hosts" COSIC Internal Report May, 2004
• Parul Ahuja, Vivek Sharma in their paper "A Review on Mobile Agent Security "International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering (IJRTE) ISSN: 2277-3878, Volume-1, Issue-2, June, 2012
• Hyungjick Lee† Jim Alves-Foss and Scott Harrison paper "The Use of Encrypted Functions for Mobile Agent Security" in the Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences – 2004

Index Terms

Keywords