Evaluating mobile agent platform security

Abstract

Agent mobility requires additional security standards. While the theoretical aspects of mobile agent security have been widely studied, there are few studies about the security standards of current agent platforms. In this paper, test cases are proposed to assess agent platform security. These tests focus on malicious agents trying to attack other agents or the agency. Currently, they have been carried out for two agent platforms: JADE and SeMoA. These tests show which of the known theoretical security problems are relevant in practice. Furthermore, they reveal how these problems were addressed by the respective platform and what security flaws are present. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.