Dynamic multi-signatures for secure autonomous agents

Mobile agents are an appealing technology for distributed applications in open networks. A major problem is the asymmetric relation of mobile agents and their execution environment in matters of security. The security concerns are even greater in the case where agents are executed autonomously in multiple hosts, and in particular when the environment is hostile. The proposed solutions in the literature for secure autonomous agents are more of theoretic interest since they are inefficient for real applications. We propose a cryptographic solution for secure autonomous agents which is based on dynamically generated message-flexible multi-signatures. Our scheme is practical and does not compromise the advantages of the mobile agent paradigm.