Abstract for Lora Kassab Name: Lora Kassab Organization: NRL E-mail: kassab@itd.nrl.navy.mil

We expect that future Navy systems will use agents in one form or another, probably based on commercial technology. For several good commercial reasons, it seems unlikely that the commercial world will produce an agent infrastructure that will resist the kinds of attacks that the Navy should protect itself against, however. Consequently, we are interested in the feasibility of developing an infrastructure that would interoperate with commercial agent systems but be less vulnerable to such attacks. As a first step in this direction, we have recently worked with Javasoft to draft a preliminary security model for JDK 1.2. We expect to continue related work in the coming year.

In the past year, one of us (Meadows) drafted and presented a paper to a workshop on Foundations for Secure Mobile Code that considered the issue of whether and how an agent might protect itself against attacks from the system on which it is executing.