Mobile agent security based on mutual authentication and elliptic curve cryptography

Abstract

Mobile agent system is a satisfying solution for the implementation and maintenance of applications distributed over large-scale networks, this solution is very used in solving complex problems since they are autonomous, Intelligent, robust and fault-tolerant. Mobile agents have the capacity to migrate from one node to another all over the network allowing reduction in communication costs. Although they possess all these advantages, using them in distributed environment increases the threat to mobile agent security and during their mobility they can face different types of attacks such as of attacks like Replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack, Cookie theft attack, Offline password guessing attack, Stolen-verifier attack. In this paper we investigate the security of distributed mobile agent system. We propose a solution based on a secure Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) protocol to ensure mutual authentication and protect the agent from different known attacks. The implementation of the proposed solution is obtained using Java Agent Development Framework (JADE). Also, Binary serialization is used to establish a flexible portability of the agent. Finally, we present security and performance analysis, for our solution to secure mobile agent in distributed systems.