TAMAP: A New Trust-based Approach for Mobile Agent Protection
Résumé
Human activities are increasingly based on the use of distant resources and services, and on the interaction between remotely located parties that may know little about each other. Mobile agents are the most suited technology. They must therefore be prepared to execute on different hosts with various environmental security conditions. This paper introduces a trust-based mechanism to improve the security of mobile agents against malicious hosts and to allow their execution in various environments. It is based on the dynamic interaction between the agent and the host. Information collected during the interaction enables generation of an environment key. This key allows then to deduce the host’s trust degree and permits the mobile agent to adapt its execution accordingly to the host trustworthiness, its behavior history and the provided Quality of Service (QoS). An adaptive mobile agent architecture is therefore proposed. It endows the mobile agent with the ability to react with an unexpected behavior.