Data protection in mobile agents; one-time key based approach

This paper deals with security issues in a mobile agent system, especially protecting agent data from malicious servers. For this purpose, a one-time key generation system, OKGS, is proposed. In OKGS, we integrate notions of a one-way hash function and a coupler. The one-way function plays a major role in ensuring confidentiality and integrity of agent data, and the notion of a coupler is used to establish inter-relationships between consecutive encryption keys for agent data, i.e., all agent keys form a unidirectional chain. With these two distinctive features of OKGS, therefore, only the agent owner, who creates the agent bearing data, can decrypt and protect all the agent data which are gathered in the itinerary