Integrity assurance of mobile agents through public-key encryption and watermarking

Abstract

Mobile agents are autonomous complex software entities with the ability to travel across different nodes in the network to carry out computations on behalf of the user. Although mobile agents have proven to be very useful approach for distributed computation, yet in practice there are several technical challenges involved to implement them on a large scale. Most of these challenges involve security aspect in one way or the other. Protecting mobile agents against the eavesdropping attacks by malicious hosts is considered the most difficult security problem to solve. The approach that is presented here secures the agentpsilas data against eavesdropping attacks and detects the malicious hosts. Our approach is based on public-key encryption to convert the executing host results into cipher text. The ciphered results are then represented by a dynamic watermark graph structure that aids to detect the manipulation attacks performed on the agentpsilas data by the malicious hosts. Our proposed twofold technique ensures the integrity of the agentpsilas data.