A security framework for mobile agent systems

Abstract

Security is a very important challenge in mobile agent systems due to the strong dependence of agents on the platform and vice versa. According to recent studies, most current mobile agent platforms suffer from significant limitations in terms of security when they face Denial of Service (DOS) attacks. Current security solutions even provided by the mobile agent platforms or by the literature focus essentially on individual attacks and are mainly based on static models that present a lack of the permissions definition and are not detailed enough to face collaborative DOS attacks executed by multiple agents or users. This paper presents a security framework that adds security defenses to mobile agent platforms. The proposed security framework implements a standard security model described using MA-UML (Mobile Agent-Unified Modeling Language) notations. The framework lets the administrator (of agents’ place) define a precise and fine-grained authorization policy to defend against DOS attacks. The authorization enforcement in the proposed framework is dynamic : the authorization decisions executed by the proposed framework are based upon run-time parameters like the amount of activity of an agent. We implement an experiment on a mobile agent system of e-marketplaces. Given that we focus essentially on the availability criterion, the performance of the proposed framework on a place is evaluated against DOS and DDOS attacks and investigated in terms of duration of execution that is the availability of the place.