Study of mobile agents active protection in IDC network management

Mobile agent technology is a new paradigm of distributed computing that can replace the conventional client-server model. However, it has not become popular due to some problems such as security. The fact that computers have complete control over all the programs makes it very hard to protect mobile agents from malicious hosts. In this paper we propose a security approach for mobile agents, which protects mobile agents from malicious hosts. Our new approach prevents privacy attacks and integrity attacks to mobile agents from malicious hosts. This paper presents a protection scheme of mobile agent, which combining cryptography and time checking technology to verify the security of node. Cryptography is a hybrid method that mixes a function composition technique and a homomorphic encryption scheme. The protection scheme is tested in actual network management environment, which can effectively identify the malicious host.