Design and development of a practical security model for a mobile agent system

Since its appearance, mobile agent technology has been considered as a new and flexible paradigm for distributed application development. However because of code mobility, this paradigm produces new threats to security too, which are of central importance when proposing this technology for commercial applications. We show the security services which have been specifically designed and developed for the MAP agent system. Early performance measurements show how the overhead needed by the security mechanisms introduced can be acceptable if compared with the functionalities provided.