D’Agents: Security in a multiple-language, mobile-agent system

[gray:security-book]

Robert S. Gray, David Kotz, George Cybenko, and Daniela Rus. D’Agents: Security in a multiple-language, mobile-agent system. Mobile Agents and Security, chapter 9, pages 154–187. Edited by Giovanni Vigna. Volume 1419 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, 1998. doi:10.1007/3-540-68671-1. ISBN13: 978-3-540-68671-2. ©Copyright Springer-Verlag.

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.

Citable with [BibTeX]

Projects: [dagents]

Keywords: [agents] [security]

Available from the publisher: [DOI]

Available from the author: [bib] [pdf] [ps.gz]
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[Kotz research]