Abstract. Driven by the question how to identify potential communication partners and the need for well-suited communication schemes in agent-based systems, we discuss two communication concepts: sessions and global event management.Sessions establish either actively or passively a context for inter-agent interactions. Communication partners are addressed by globally unique agent identifiers or via badges. Communication in sessions is based on RPC or message mechanisms.Global event management addresses the need for anonymous communication. Event managers are employed as a synchronization means within agent groups. Based on this approach, we introduce synchronization objects, -active components that offer various synchronization services. The presented model is finally mapped onto OMG event services.
To protect mobile agents from attacks by their execution environments, or hosts, one class of protection mechanisms uses "reference states" to detect modification attacks. Reference states are agent states that have been produced by non-attacking, or reference hosts. This paper examines this class of mechanisms and present the bandwidth of the achieved protection. First, a new general definition of attacks against mobile agents is presented. As this general definition does not lead to a practicable protection scheme, the notion of reference states is introduced. This notion allows to define a protection scheme that can be used to practically realize a whole number of mechanisms to protect mobile agents. Therefore, after an initial analysis of already existing approaches, the abstract features of these approaches are extracted. A discussion examines the strengths and weaknesses of the general protection scheme, and a framework is presented that allows an agent programmer to choose a level of protection using the reference states scheme. An example illustrates the usage of the framework, measurements present the overhead of the framework for the case of the example mechanism.
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