@inproceedings {12, title = {Evaluating the Security Of Three Java-Based Mobile Agent Systems}, booktitle = {Mobile Agents}, year = {2001}, address = {Atlanta, USA}, abstract = {

The goal of mobile agent systems is to provide a distributed computing infrastructure supporting applications whose components can move between different execution environments. The design and implementation of mechanisms to relocate computations requires a careful assessment of security issues. If these issues are not addressed properly, mobile agent technology cannot be used to implement real-world applications. This paper describes the initial steps of a research effort to design and implement security middleware for mobile code systems in general and mobile agent systems in particular. This initial phase focused on understanding and evaluating the security mechanisms of existing mobile agent systems. The evaluation was performed by deploying several mobile agents systems in a testbed network, implementing attacks on the systems, and evaluating the results. The long term goal for this research is to develop guidelines for the security analysis of mobile agent systems and to determine if existing systems provide the security abstractions and mechanisms needed to develop real-world applications.

}, keywords = {mobile agents, security}, isbn = {3-540-42952-2}, url = {http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=732589}, author = {Sebastian Fischmeister and Giovani Vigna and Richard Kemmerer}, editor = {Gian Pietro Picco} } @mastersthesis {11, title = {Building Secure Mobile Agents: The Supervisor-Worker Framework}, year = {2000}, month = {03/2000}, pages = {94}, school = {Technical University Vienna}, type = {masters}, address = {Vienna}, abstract = {

Servers being visited by mobile agents are often a target of an attack. The mobile agent might steal resources, confidential data or use the server as starting point for a new attack. Accordingly many researchers devote their time to this area. However, another main problem of mobile agent security is nearly neglected: the attack of a malicious server against a mobile agent. The server can steal resources and confidential data, too. Due to the fact that the server has in general no access restrictions this problem is even harder to attack. This thesis presents a solution for this particular aspect of mobile agent security: the Supervisor-Worker Framework. The evaluation of the framework and the case study application showed that the framework effectively prevents tampering and eavesdropping and, additionally, boosts several other key aspects of mobile agents.

}, keywords = {mobile agents, mobile computing, security}, author = {Sebastian Fischmeister} } @inproceedings {75, title = {The Supervisor--Worker Pattern}, booktitle = {6th Annual Conference on Patters Languages of Programming (PLOP)}, year = {1999}, address = {Monticello, Illinois}, abstract = {

Mobile agents and mobile computing have grown in importance recently. The Supervisor-Worker pattern is an architectural pattern that helps architects solving the problem of protecting the mobile agent from leakage and tampering. The fundamental Master-Slave Pattern is widespread and heavily used in traditional applications. The Supervisor-Worker pattern inherits many of the Master-Slave pattern\’s benefits. It also solves several of the security issues of mobile agents.

}, keywords = {mobile agents, mobile computing, security}, author = {Sebastian Fischmeister and Wolfgang Lugmayr} }