Securing Mobile Agent Based Tele-Assistance Systems

Abstract

Abstract. Nowadays the scientific community is trying to design new techniques in the search for solving security problems in mobile agent technology. There are now some industry initiatives for using agents in real environments which need a solution for some of their security problems. Companies offering assistive service are getting cost reduction due to tele-assistive technologies. In this paper we present a proposal based on secure tunnels to add confidentiality and integrity to any agent platform, present or future, without making any changes to its source-code. Our system is currently implemented and working as part of a complete mobile multi-agent system used for tele-assistance. During our research we have also detected many other problems regarding the tunnelling approach. 1 A new perspective of security in mobile multi-agent systems There are a growing number of elderly people in Europe. Tele-assistive technologies are getting a lot of importance in cost reduction for companies and public insurance. Elderly community is also benefiting from a new era of comfort and additional services, such as continuous monitoring, full-time contact with relatives, new diversion services, etc. Relatives are also benefiting from this new kind of tele-assistance that lets them be in close contact with insurance centers and their family. As tele-assistive or tele-care technologies cope with personal data, there are even specific laws about this data treatment. Depending on the data sensitiveness stored and treated by the companies (public or private) they need to use different protection technologies. A relatively new approach to design and implement tele-care services is to use mobile multi-agent technology. Different classes of agents may be used to perform a large number of local and remote assistance and supervision tasks, such as sensorial data collection, alarm notification, health conditions monitoring, etc. This new paradigm has a lot of practically unresolved security-related problems. Systems and users are exposed to access policy violations, communications integrity and/or confidentiality, system crashes, information theft, information modifications, etc. These problems and others added from the use of mobile agent technologies