Information theoretical approach to mobile code

Abstract

Mobile code is software code that may be run at a remote location, which is possibly untrustworthy. This paper provides a secrecy model for mobile code based on Shannon's information theoretic model. Due to different characteristics of mobile code, such as the possibility of plaintext-attacks and untrustworthy execution environments, a new definition for the maximum level of secrecy is necessary. This results in different minimum requirements to obtain this level of secrecy. Furthermore, the unicity distance is derived in various situations