TAMAP: a new trust-based approach for mobile agent protection

Abstract

Human activities are increasingly based on the use of distant resources and services, and on the interaction between remotely located parties that may know little about each other. Mobile agents are the most suited technology. They must therefore be prepared to execute on different hosts with various environmental security conditions. This paper introduces a trust-based mechanism to improve the security of mobile agents against malicious hosts and to allow their execution in various environments. It is based on the dynamic interaction between the agent and the host. Information collected during the interaction enables generation of an environment key. This key allows then to deduce the host's trust degree and permits the mobile agent to adapt its execution accordingly to the host trustworthiness, its behavior history and the provided Quality of Service (QoS). An adaptive mobile agent architecture is therefore proposed. It endows the mobile agent with the ability to react with an unexpected behavior.

A Survey of Self-protected Mobile Agents

“…For example, Filiol in [19] uses the environmental key as a basic technique to forbid a Malware code analysis and Hacini [20] employs it to avoid analysis of mobile agent services. So, the environmental key generation approach can be useful when the receiver is not aware of the conditions required to the execution of the requested service.…”

“…This technique reduces the possibility of the shared data being pilfered by a single host. This idea deserves to be employed by approaches where the mobile agent service (secret) is subdivided in several tasks and when mobile agent carries out a preliminary investigation of trustworthiness of the visited host which shows the selected execution [20].…”

“…They explain rational and irrational components and uses of trust. Their work represents a support of TAMAP approach [20] where trust value is based on trust ingredients (evaluation of the situation and the behavior).…”

“…Indeed, the trust estimation is dynamic and it is used to enable the mobile agent to adapt its execution in entrusted environments. Hacini in [20] exploits opportunities offered by the dynamic adaptability mechanism to protect the mobile agent against the visited host. The dynamic adaptability mechanism is used to offer the mobile agent the possibility to modify its behavior.…”

Mobile Agent Security Against Malicious Platforms

“…TAMAP Hacini et al (2007) presented a trust-based scheme for mobile agent protection against malicious and potentially malicious platforms in the year 2007. This scheme is based on interactions between the agent and the platform.…”