Securing your data in agent-based P2P systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology can be naturally integrated with mobile agent technology in Internet applications, taking advantage of the autonomy, mobility, and efficiency of mobile agents in accessing and processing data. We address the problem of protecting critical information in agent-based P2P Internet applications under two different scenarios. First, we assume the route of a mobile agent in the P2P system is fixed. Under this assumption, we propose the usage of an efficient parallel dispatch model where the agent´s route is signcrypted at the first step and dispatched to each new peer to collect information. Then, we assume the route is not specified and we propose the usage of a modified multi-signcryption scheme to guarantee protection. Based on this second approach, a mobile agent determines the next peer to communicate with independently and information is collected dynamically in one round of visiting a group of peers. Security issues under the two proposed models are then discussed.