Mobile Agents Computing: Security Issues and Algorithmic Solutions

Abstract

The use of mobile agents is becoming increasingly popular when computing in networked environments, ranging from Internet to the Data Grid, both as a theoretical computational paradigm and as a system-supported programming platform.

In networked systems that support autonomous mobile agents, the main theoretical concern is how to develop efficient agent-based system protocols; that is, to design protocols that will allow a team of identical simple agents to cooperatively perform (possibly complex) system tasks.

The computational problems related to these operations are definitely non trivial, and a great deal of theoretical research is devoted to the study of conditions for the solvability of these problems and to the discovery of efficient algorithmic solutions.

At a practical level, in these environments, security is the most pressing concern, and possibly the most difficult to address. Actually, even the most basic security issues, in spite of their practical urgency and of the amount of effort, must still be effectively addressed.

Among the severe security threats faced in distributed mobile computing environments, two are particularly troublesome: harmful agent (that is, the presence of malicious mobile processes), and harmful host (that is, the presence at a network site of harmful stationary processes).

The former problem is particularly acute in unregulated non-cooperative settings such as Internet (e.g., e-mail transmitted viruses). The latter not only exists in those settings, but also in environments with regulated access and where agents cooperate towards common goals (e.g., sharing of resources or distribution of a computation on the Grid). In fact, a local (hardware or software) failure might render a host harmful.

In this talk I will concentrate on two security problems, one for each type: locating a black hole, and capturing an intruder; I will describe the recent algorithmic solutions and remaining open questions for both problems.