An overview of security issues and techniques in mobile agents

Abstract

Mobile agents are programs that travel autonomously through a computer network in order to perform some computation or gather information on behalf of a human user or an application. In the last several years, mobile agents have found numerous applications including e-commerce. In most applications, the security of mobile agents is of the utmost importance. This paper gives an overview of the main security issues related to the mobile agent paradigm. These issues include security threats, requirements, and techniques for keeping the mobile agent platform and the agent itself secure against each other. © 2005 by International Federation for Information Processing.