A new scheme for securing mobile agents

The advent of mobile agents has introduced new possibilities for distributed computations in networked computers. However, security issues become more and more important when agent code is to be executed in unknown environments. By applying identity-based encryption schemes to mobile agent systems, we develop a new model to facilitate mobile agent migrations to unknown hosts which are not listed in their initial itineraries. We show that identity-based encryption can provide communication security, while tracing mobile agents on different hosts. In our model, a trusted third party is responsible for tracking hosts visited by the agent.