A Security Architecture for a Mobile Intelligent Agent System

摘要

Unlike traditional mobile intelligent agent systems where a small set of APIs are provided to support limited agent (code) mobility capabilities, a novel agent system, called Wave, offers a complete high-level language that is, despite its fairly simple syntax, rich in semantics and mechanisms of mobile agent integration, control and management for rapid, effective realization of seamless, cooperative distributed applications. However like many other mobile agent systems, the lack of security in Wave highly restricts its scope of applications. In this paper, we propose a securitv architecture and implement a securitv system based on this architecture for the Wave Security System. This securitv svstem makes use of a rich security model that gives identification to each principal user and provides access control to a very fine level of granularity. The security policy for access control can be customized to meet the interest of individual principals. The security system also offers some preliminary-idea of a method of virtual agent execution, which can be used to detect if a state of a Wave agent is tampered. Although the security architecture was developed for Wave, its applicability can suit other mobile intelligent systems, in general.