Mobile agents protection in the Internet environment

The Mobile Agent (MA) paradigm seems to be a promising technology for developing applications in open, distributed and heterogeneous environments, such as the Internet. Mobile agents can overcome some of the limits of the traditional client/server model and can easily integrate with the Web to improve application accessibility. Many application areas, such as electronic commerce, mobile computing, network management and information retrieval can benefit from the application of the MA technology. However, a wider diffusion of MA is currently limited by the lack of a comprehensive security framework. Answering to the requirement of protection for both execution sites and mobile agents can boost the acceptance of the MA paradigm in the Internet environment. The paper describes an MA environment, called Secure and Open Mobile Agent (SOMA), that is based on a thorough security model and provides a wide range of tools and mechanisms to build and enforce flexible security policies. In particular, we focus on the problem of how mobile agents can be protected from malicious behavior of execution sites and we propose a distributed multiple-hops integrity protocol for mobile agent protection, fully integrated in SOMA.