A Solution Based on Cryptographic Hardware to Protect Agents

Agent-systems can bring important benefits especially in applications scenarios where highly distributed, autonomous, intelligence, self-organizing and robust systems are required. Furthermore, high levels of autonomy and self-organization of agent systems provide excellent support for development of systems with high dependability requirements. Two main research areas that fall in this category are Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence (AmI). Despite the attention given to agent-based systems by the research community the agent technology has failed to gain wide acceptance and has been applied only in few specific real world scenarios. Security issues play an important role in the development of multi-agent systems and are considered to be one of the main issues to solve before agent technology is ready to be widely used outside the research community. From our point of view the protection of malicious hosts is the most difficult security problem to solve before agent technology is ready to be widely used. In this paper we describe a hardware based solution. Our work is based in the protection of migration protocol, which is based on the use of tamper resistant cryptographic hardware. The result of our work is a library built on JADE that implements the secure migration for agents named Secure Migration Library for Agents (SecMiLiA). This library provides a friendly use of the Trusted Computing technology for agent based system developers.