Mobile Agent Security Using ID-Based Agreement Protocol and Binary Serialization
Résumé
Recent days, the systems based on mobile agents have attracted the attention of many
researchers in different areas, because of the autonomic and pro-active aspects of the
agent, as well as its adaptive and dynamic behaviors in solving complex problems.
However, the mobility of these entities needs to be secured against multiple
vulnerabilities that present a real obstacle to its wide expansion. When the mobile agent
is migrating from one node to another over the network, it is difficult to guarantee that it
will be executed safely and correctly on the hosting platform, neither that it will not
encounter in its way malicious entities that try to harm it. In this paper, we try to address
these security issues by introducing an approach based on cryptographic mechanisms.
This approach involves an Identity-Based Key Agreement Protocol to get a session key
and ensure authentication, an Advanced Standard Encryption (AES) for the
confidentiality of data exchanged, as well as a Binary Serialization to get an easy and
persistent portability of the agent across the network.