Itinerant agents for mobile computing

Chess, David M.; Grosof, Benjamin N.; Harrison, Colin; Levine, David; Parris, Colin; Tsudik, Gene

doi:10.1109/98.468361

Cited by 275 publications

(98 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Data mining is a convenient application for mobile agents due to locality of reference: agents optimize a search by wandering from site to site with large volumes of information. (See [7] for additional benefits.) Nevertheless, mobile agents still haven't achieved wide acceptance.…”

Section: Mobile Agentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mobile Objects and Agents (MOA)

Milojicic

LaForge²,

Chauhan³

1998

Distrib. Syst. Engng.

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This paper describes the design and implementation of the Mobile Objects and Agents (MOA) project at the Open Group Research Institute. MOA was designed to support migration, communication and control of agents. It was implemented on top of the Java Virtual Machine, without any modifications to it. The initial project goals were to support communication across agent migration, as a means for collaborative work; and to provide extensive resource control, as a basic support for countering denial of service attacks. In the course of the project we added two further goals: compliance with the Java Beans component model which provides for additional configurability and customization of agent system and agent applications; and interoperability which allows cooperation with other agent systems.This paper analyzes the architecture of MOA, in particular the support for mobility, naming and locating, communication, and resource management. Object and component models of MOA are discussed and some implementation details described. We summarize the lessons learned while developing and implementing MOA and compare it to related work. IntroductionMobility has always attracted researchers in computer science. This interest spans from general observations, such as "if it weren't for mobility, we would still be trees" [10], and the analogies with the real world "migrating birds and nomadic tribes moving due to the lack of resources", to purely technical reasons, such as improving locality of reference and difference between local and remote semantics.One of the first incarnations of software mobile entities. is worms [30], which could spread across nodes and arbitrarily clone. Unrestricted implementations of worms and viruses have received negative connotations, due to security breaches and denial of service attacks [13].The next generation of mobile entities, known as process migration, were implemented at the operating sysThis work was supported in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Rome Laboratory of the Air Force Materiel Command. tem (OS) level. There were many implementations of process and object migration [3,12,19,31], but none has achieved wide acceptance. Due to inherent complexity, it was hard to introduce process migration without impacting the stability and robustness of the underlying OS.Mobile objects and agents have attracted significant attention recently. In addition to mobile code (such as applets), agents consist of data and non-transient system state that can travel between the nodes in a distributed system (intranet or Internet). Compared to mobile objects, mobile agents also represent someone; they can perform autonomous actions on behalf of a user or another agent. This paper describes the Mobile Objects and Agents (MOA) project at the Open Group Research Institute. The obvious question is why yet another mobile agent system? There were a few reasons. None of the existing systems at the time of starting the project were mature enough to be used as a starting point for our wor...

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Section: Mobile Agentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mobile Objects and Agents (MOA)

Milojicic

LaForge²,

Chauhan³

1998

Distrib. Syst. Engng.

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“…Unless "trusted (and tamper-resistant) hardware" is available on each agent server [4], something which is extremely unlikely in the near future, there is no way to prevent a malicious machine from examining or modifying any part of the agents that visit it. Thus, the real problem is not to prevent theft and tampering, but instead to prevent the machine from using stolen information in a meaningful way and to detect tampering as soon as possible, ideally as soon as the agent migrates onto the next machine.…”

Section: Protecting the Agentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Unfortunately, there is no single mechanism that can solve this problem, and it is unlikely that there will ever be a complete technical solution, due to the unimaginable variety of theft and tampering attacks that can be mounted against a visiting agent. Instead, some part of the solution will always be sociological and legal pressures [4].…”

Section: Protecting the Agentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Typically, D'Agents servers are configured so that machines under single administrative control trust each other but no one else. 4 Thus, if an agent migrates from its home machine into a set of mutually trusting machines (and then stays within that set), each machine will be able to (directly or indirectly) authenticate the owner, and will give the agent the full set of access permissions for that owner. Once the agent leaves the set of machines, however, it becomes anonymous, and remains anonymous even when it comes back, since the nontrusted machines might have modified the agent in a malicious way.…”

Section: Authenticationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…-Components. Perhaps the most powerful idea is to divide each agent into components [4]. Components can be added to the agent as it migrates, and each component can be encrypted and signed with different keys.…”

Section: Protecting the Agentmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

D’Agents: Security in a Multiple-Language, Mobile-Agent System

Gray

Kotz

Cybenko

et al. 1998

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

119

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Abstract. Mobile-agent systems must address three security issues: protecting an individual machine, protecting a group of machines, and protecting an agent. In this chapter, we discuss these three issues in the context of D'Agents, a mobile-agent system whose agents can be written in Tcl, Java and Scheme. (D'Agents was formerly known as Agent Tcl.) First we discuss mechanisms existing in D'Agents for protecting an individual machine: (1) cryptographic authentication of the agent's owner, (2) resource managers that make policy decisions based on the owner's identity, and (3) secure execution environments for each language that enforce the decisions of the resource managers. Then we discuss our planned market-based approach for protecting machine groups. Finally we consider several (partial) solutions for protecting an agent from a malicious machine.

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Providing fine-grained access control for Java programs via binary editing

Pandey

Hashii

2000

Concurrency: Pract. Exper.

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SUMMARYThere is considerable interest in programs that can migrate from one host to another and execute. Mobile programs are appealing because they support efficient utilization of network resources and extensibility of information servers. However, since they cross administrative domains, they have the ability to access and possibly misuse a host's protected resources. In this paper, we present a novel approach for controlling and protecting a site's resources. In this approach, a site uses a declarative policy language to specify a set of constraints on accesses to resources. A set of code transformation tools enforces these constraints on mobile programs by integrating the access constraint checking code directly into the mobile program and resource definitions. Using this approach, a site does not need to explicitly include calls to reference monitors in order to protect resources. The performance analysis show that the approach performs better than reference monitor-based approaches in many cases.

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Itinerant agents for mobile computing

Cited by 275 publications

References 9 publications

Mobile Objects and Agents (MOA)

Mobile Objects and Agents (MOA)

D’Agents: Security in a Multiple-Language, Mobile-Agent System

Providing fine-grained access control for Java programs via binary editing

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