Mobile agent security using ID-based agreement protocol and binary serialization

Abstract

Recent days, the systems based on mobile agents have attracted the attention of many researchers in different areas, because of the autonomic and pro-active aspects of the agent, as well as its adaptive and dynamic behaviors in solving complex problems. However, the mobility of these entities needs to be secured against multiple vulnerabilities that present a real obstacle to its wide expansion. When the mobile agent is migrating from one node to another over the network, it is difficult to guarantee that it will be executed safely and correctly on the hosting platform, neither that it will not encounter in its way malicious entities that try to harm it. In this paper, we try to address these security issues by introducing an approach based on cryptographic mechanisms. This approach involves an Identity-Based Key Agreement Protocol to get a session key and ensure authentication, an Advanced Standard Encryption (AES) for the confidentiality of data exchanged, as well as a Binary Serialization to get an easy and persistent portability of the agent across the network.