In the track of the agent protection: A solution based on cryptographic hardware

Abstract

The agent-based computing represents a promising paradigm for emerging ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence scenarios due to the nature of the mobile agents that fit perfectly in these environments. However, the lack of the appropriate security mechanisms is hindering the application of this paradigm in real world applications. The protection of malicious hosts is the most difficult security problem to solve in mobile agent systems. In this paper we describe our solution, which is a mechanism to solve this problem. Our work is based in a new agent migration protocol based on the use of tamper resistant cryptographic hardware. Concretely, we base our work on the use of the Trusted Computing technology. The result of our work is a library built on JADE that implements the secure migration for agents named Secure Migration Library for Agents (SecMiLiA). This library provides a friendly use of the Trusted Computing technology for agent based system developers. © Springer-Verlag 2010.