LAVA: secure delegation of mobile applets: design, implementation and applications

Abstract

Mobile agents are tasks or processes which can be autonomously delegated or transferred from one network node to another: This distributed computing paradigm is modern and powerful. Many network-based applications have been developed or designed under this model. The application areas include, for example, intelligent agent, network and system management, web-based mobile applets, electronic commerce and more recently, active networking. While offering a new attractive paradigm over the Internet, this mobile agent technology introduces significant new security threats. For example, a malicious agent with certain access rights might be able to destroy critical information on the nodes it visits. LAVA is a proposed architecture to facilitate secure delegation of executable code. In this paper we present this architecture, its design, and our prototype implementation. One SNMP network management application has been developed on top of the LAVA prototype.