Components-based software architecture for secure mobile agents via two strategies of adaptation

Abstract

Security presents a crucial point in mobile agent systems and may hinder the expansion and use of this paradigm. The protection of mobile agents is considered as one of the greatest challenges of security, because the platform of execution has access to all the components of the mobile agent. In this paper, we present a new architecture paradigm of mobile agents, which allows the separation of the implementation tasks of the agent and its security mechauisms. Our approach is based on using two strategies of adaptation to adapt the mobile agent security at runtime, depending on the sensitivity of the services required to perform the duties of the agent and the degree of confidence of the visited platforms. The first is a static adaptation performed by the MSAS (the Management System of Agents Security). The second is a reflexive structural dynamic adaptation performed by the mobile agent itself. These two adaptations take into account the dynamic security requirements in systems based on mobile agent.