When mobile agents do comparison shopping for their owners, they are subject to attacks of malicious hosts executing the agents.We present a family of protocols that protect the computation results established by free-roaming mobile agents. Our protocols enable the owner of the agent to detect upon its return whether a visited host has maliciously altered the state of the agent, thus providing forward integrity and truncation resilience. In an environment without public-key infrastructure, the protocols are based only on a secret hash chain. With a public-key infrastructure, the protocols also guarantee non-repudiability.
Efficient means of electronic interaction are an essential requirement for the integration of different companies' business processes along the value chain. Until recently, this interaction relied on expensive, complex and inflexible solutions, mostly based on EDI or some proprietary means. The high set-up costs and time associated with this type of infrastructure prohibits the dynamic forging of business partnerships, which is of utmost importance to the services industry. The CrossFlow architecture supports the dynamic establishment and enactment of a business relationship between two organisations, based on a contract that specifies this relationship. This is achieved by creating an electronic market where advertising and searching for compatible business partners takes place. This is further enhanced by automating the set-up of the contract enactment and supervision infrastructure, and by connecting them together to allow the business processes of the partners to cross their organisational boundaries.
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