Secure storage and communication in J2ME based lightweight multi-agent systems

Abstract

Securing data and applications is critical in the wireless era. The successive increase in wireless communication opens vulnerabilities to confidential information. This paper aims at investigating the issues related to security when the Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) based multi-agent system applications are run on different handheld devices. Agent's information must be protected on the local device as well as on other devices during communication. J2ME MIDP security model does not provide secure data storage and communication mechanism for applications running on different mobile devices. This paper proposes a mechanism for secure storage of agent's information and also securing communication between agents in J2ME based lightweight multi-agent system. We present a new solution to this problem by providing a security framework that can be used to provide agent's secure storage and communication on the application layer by using the existing cryptographic techniques. Storing the encrypted data on local device helps securing the agent's information. In this approach for secure agent's messaging the encrypted data is communicated with the help of session keys exchange, so no need to encrypt the data at runtime for communication as only the keys are encrypted. This results in the better security level and minimal performance overhead. The solution has been evaluated on the SAGE-Lite (lightweight multi-agent system) in order to cope with the security drawbacks related to agent's secure storage and communication. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.