Secure mobile agent execution in virtual environment

Creating a secure framework for mobile agents that leverage such an efficient tool’s usage is yet to be found [Farmer WM, Guttman JD, Swarup V (1996) Proceedings of the 19th national information systems security conference, Tardo J, Valente L (1996) Mobile agent security and telescript, IEEE CompCon]. There are some available approaches to prevent agent-to-agent and agent-to-host type attacks; however, host-to-agent type attacks prevention is still at large [Jansen W, Karygiannis T NIST special publication 800-19—Mobile agent security, National Institute of Standards and Technology]. In this paper, we have implemented a framework in which both agents and hosts are protected. The three virtualization techniques (vserver, vmware, and xen) are utilized as host environments to create a secure, scalable, and efficient framework. Three agent platforms (ajanta, aglets, and sage) are installed on these virtual environments and tested for attacks. Along with a trusted server, our framework claims to be a solution to prevent host-to-agent type attacks during execution as well as most of the other types of attacks. As a result, we believe that the convergence of two promising technologies (virtualization and mobile agents) can create cost-effective, robust, reliable, and easy-to-manage frameworks.