Securing Mobile Agent Systems in Which the Agents Migrate via Publish/Subscribe Paradigm

Abstract—Multi agent systems especially mobile agent systems provide great environment for distributed computing. Forcing the mobile agents to migrate via publish/subscribe paradigm brings the mobile agent systems a very high degree of scalability and flexibility by loosely coupling the communicating entities. However, in order to realize such a scalable and flexible system, security is much more important than ever. In this paper we present a security architecture which is also mobile like the agents in the system. The agents themselves provide the security functionality for their safety. In order to secure whole system hosts visited by the mobile agents also have to be secured against malicious mobile agents. Because we load the security functionality on agents some special agents acting on behalf of their hosts protect the host systems. This architecture also loosely couples the agents with their host platforms and this promotes the inter-platform mobility along with interoperability in the context of security. The architecture itself is flexible. This property provides agility on easy adoption of new security technologies against emerging threats.

Index Terms—Multi agent systems, mobile agents, security, publish/subscribe paradigm, agent migration.

Ahmet Ali Karzan is with the Department of Computer Science, Informatics Institute, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey (e-mail: alikarzan@yahoo.com).
Nadia Erdogan is with the Department of Computer Engineering, Faculty of Computer and Informatics, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey (e-mail: nerdogan@itu.edu.tr).

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Cite: Ahmet Ali Karzan and Nadia Erdoğan, "Securing Mobile Agent Systems in Which the Agents Migrate via Publish/Subscribe Paradigm," Lecture Notes on Software Engineering vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 11-15, 2014.