Design, implementation and testing of mobile agent protection mechanism for MANETS

Summary form only given. In the current research, we present an operation framework and protection mechanism to facilitate a secure environment to protect mobile agents against tampering. The system depends on the presence of an authentication authority. The advantage of the proposed system is that security measures are an integral part of the design, thus common security retrofitting problems do not arise. This is due to the presence of the ElGamal encryption mechanism to protect its confidential content and any collected data by the agent from the visited host. Therefore, eavesdropping on information from the agent no longer reveals any confidential information. Also, the inherent security constraints within the framework allow the system to operate as an intrusion detection system for any mobile agent environment. The mechanism is tested for most well known severe attacks against agents and networked systems. The scheme proved to have promising performance that highly recommends it for the type of transactions that needs highly secure environments, e. g., business to business.