On the security properties and attacks against Mobile agent watermark encapsulation(MAWE)

Mobile agent technology is an attempt towards bringing the computation process nearer to the physical location of data in a distributed system. Although it has been extensively studied and applied in a variety of applications but still its usage is limited mainly because of the security issues associated with its usage. Mobile agent watermark encapsulation (MAWE) is a method that first embeds a watermark in the execution results of a mobile agent (MA) and then the watermark results are encapsulated using digital signature. Any malicious changes in the results can be easily tracked by the owner of the mobile agent. In this paper we discuss the attacks that can be launched against Mobile agent watermark encapsulation (MAWE) and how the security properties for mobile agent data integrity are fulfilled. We try to model the behavior of a malicious host by launching a series of attacks against mobile agent and then we see to what extent the security properties for MA can be achieved. The experiments performed in a typical ticket booking scenario suggest that MAWE can be used to protect the results of MA.