Security in the Ajanta mobile agent system

Abstract

A mobile agent is an object which can autonomously migrate in a distributed system to perform tasks on behalf of its creator. Security issues in regard to the protection of host resources, as well as the agent themselves, raise significant obstacles in practical applications of the agent paradigm. This article describes the security architecture of Ajanta, a Java‐based system for mobile agent programming. This architecture provides mechanisms to protect server resources from malicious agents, agent data from tampering by malicious servers and communication channels during its travel, and protection of name service data and the global namespace. We present here a proxy based mechanism for secure access to server resources by agents. Using Java's class loader model and thread group mechanism, isolated execution domains are created for agents at a server. An agent can contain three kinds of protected objects: read‐only objects whose tampering can be detected, encrypted objects for specific servers, and a secure append‐only log of objects. A generic authentication protocol is used for all client–server interactions when protection is required. Using this mechanism, the security model of Ajanta enforces protection of namespaces, and secure execution of control primitives such as agent recall or abort. Ajanta also supports communication between agents using RMI, which can be controlled if required by the servers' security policies. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Trust Building in the Creation of Virtual Enterprises in Mobile Agent-Based Architectures

“…This allows for selective disclosure of agent state (Karnik, 1998). In.addition, the programmer can use empiric methods -as in (Hohl, 1998) -to prevent disclosure of agents' sensitive data by malicious platforms.…”

Secure Network Management Within an Open-Source Mobile Agent Framework

“…Though agent cooperation is possible in SNMP servicing, in this paper inter-agent messaging is not part of the core system. The Java-based Ajanta system [34] actively addresses some of the security related aspects of mobile agents. Ajanta offers a mechanism for authenticated communications, whenever an agent is to be transferred between two servers.…”

Toward a security architecture for smart messages: challenges, solutions, and open issues

“…Among them is host protection, for which mobile agents have proposed solutions based on cryptographic authentication of the agent's owner. Examples of such systems are Telescript [25], IBM Itinerant Agents [6], Ajanta [15], and D'Agents [10]. The existing solutions control the access to resources on the recipient host by using capability lists or access control lists (ACL).…”

“…Although the security for both mobile agents [10,15] and ad hoc networks [22,12] have been extensively studied, this is the first attempt (to the best of our knowledge) to investigate the security issues for a system based on code migration over mobile ad hoc networks. Given the complexity of the problem, our intentions are threefold: identify the unique challenges faced by such a system, design an extensible framework for SM security which provides solutions for the basic, but critical SM security requirements, and present the open issues that remain to be solved.…”