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Mobile Agent Security Based on Cryptographic Trace and SOS Agent Mechanisms

Sophia Alami-Kamouri, Nabil Moukafih, Ghizlane Orhanou, and Said Elhajji
Laboratory of Mathematics, Computer Sciences and Applications-Information Security Faculty of Sciences, Mohammed V University in Rabat. Morocco

Abstract—Mobile agent technology quickly emerged in the field of distributed computing. Its use offers several advantages compared to the classic Client / Server model such as reducing network traffic, using disconnected computing, and offering more flexibility in application development, etc. Although mobile agent technology is considered as a powerful tool, it has some security problems that need to be overcome. Mobile agents, due to their mobility are vulnerable to attacks in a hostile environment. For this reason, it is necessary to put effective security techniques to protect them when they move from their home host to a new one. In this paper, we propose two security mechanisms to enhance mobile agent security. On one hand, we use a cryptographic trace to ensure mobile agent integrity and origin authentication, and on the other hand an SOS agent monitor’s model is proposed to protect the mobile agent system against malicious hosts and DOS attacks. An implementation of the SOS agent approach will be presented.
 
Index Terms—Mobile agent, security, SOS agent, cryptographic trace.

Cite: Sophia Alami-Kamouri, Nabil Moukafih, Ghizlane Orhanou, and Said Elhajji, "Mobile Agent Security Based on Cryptographic Trace and SOS Agent Mechanisms,” Journal of Communications vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 221-230, March 2020. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.15.3.221-230

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.