Applying trust policies for protecting mobile agents against DoS

Abstract

In the world of mobile agents, security aspects are extensively being discussed. Denial of service (DoS) attacks are of considerable interest, i.e., when malicious hosts either delete received agents or prevent them from continuing their route. This paper presents a method for a posteriori identification of such malicious hosts to build a trust policy. Depending on how much the agent owner trusts the hosts, he can either define an appropriate order in which selected hosts should be visited, or he can decide which hosts he does not want to contact again. We also show how the sequence of hosts should be determined in order to minimize some costs.