Security Issues in Mobile Agent Applications

An autonomous mobile agent is an executing program that can migrate from machine to machine in a heterogeneous network under its own control. An agent can either follow a pre-assigned path on the network or determine its itinerary based on the data collected from the network. Facilities for highly dynamic movement of code and data enable a program to take advantage of the locality of data. It also allows one to optimize between the requirements of low bandwidth, high latency and disconnected network connections. This computing paradigm, which exploits code, data and state mobility, raises many new security issues that are quite different from conventional client/server systems. Agent servers that provide an execution environment for the agents to execute can be attacked by malicious agents. Similarly agents could be carrying sensitive information about their owners and should be protected from tampering by malicious hosts. The data collected by the agent from one host should also be protected from tampering by another host in the itinerary. In this paper, various security issues that arise in mobile agents applications were examined.