Abstract—Mobile Agents is a new paradigm for dis-tributed computing where security is very essential to the acceptance of this paradigm in a large scale distributed en¬vironment. In this paper, we propose protection mechanisms for mobile agents. In these mechanisms, the authentication of mobile agents and the access control to the system resources are controlled by the mobile-agents platform. Each agent defines its own access control policy with regard to other agents using an Interface Definition Language (IDL), thus enforcing modularity and easing programming task. An evaluation of these mechanisms has been conducted. The measurements give the overhead involved by the proposed protection mechanisms to the performance of mobile agents. An important advantage of our protection mechanisms are transparency to agents and the portability of non-secure applications onto a secure environment. A mobile agent system and the protection mechanisms have been implemented. Our experiments have shown the feasibility and the advantages of our mechanisms.

Index Terms—Mobile agents, security, authentication, ac-cess control

Cite:Leila Ismail, "A Secure Mobile Agents Platform," Journal of Communications, vol. 3, no.2, pp.1-12, 2008.