Securing network using mobile agents

Protecting mobile agents from malicious host is an active area of research that will enable future applications to utilize the paradigm of computing. In this paper we consider security issue that need to be addressed before multi-agent systems in general, and mobile agents system in particular, can be used for a broad range of commercial applications for the network. Here we propose a scheme to protect the nodes and the mobile agents it spawns from malicious hosts (nodes). Here nodes spawn agents to collect trust information about concerned nodes from its neighborhood. Each agent is given with a list of (concerned) nodes (hosts) to visit, by their owner (a node). The agents, while migrating collect views from other hosts. The concept of dummy agent is used to protect the agents while being enroute from getting lost. Hash based message authentication code is used to detect any malicious host platform that attempts to modify an agent's code.