A scalable and secure mobile agent based surrogate host system

Abstract

Mobile agents represent a distributed computing paradigm in which software migrates autonomously from one host in a network to another. In spite of its promises, mobile agent systems have not gained substantial acceptance because of the security concerns that have not been adequately addressed yet. In this paper, we propose an architecture that allows user programs to run on third party hosts called Surrogate hosts. The architecture presents a hybrid approach utilizing both mobile agent paradigm as well as client-server paradigm. Apart from extending the computing power of the user system, the proposed surrogate host system allows users to run their applications while the user system remains disconnected. The proposed architecture reduces the stringency of security requirements of mobile agents based systems, is scaleable and uses a load balancing mechanism to evenly distribute the user programs.