Abstract:

A potential range of applications are based on the use of mobile agent code technology. Among the significant areas of applications are artificial intelligence, industrial and management applications, data mining and distributed data bases. The Mobile Agent Code technology is based on the idea of traveling program code, the code travels from one node of the computers network to another node. The most challenging problem is the security problems. Security risks involve the security of the agent code and the security of the hosting machine. Among these security problems is the self proving of the agent code. The code has to prove its identity as a legitimately initiated code, initiated by a legitimate father machine. Proving this legitimacy includes proving that the code is legally generated and the operations it performs are legitimate. In this paper a Father/Foster protocol is introduced for proving the code legitimacy. Machines are classified to two classes, the father machine, and the foster machine. Father machine generates the mobile agent code; foster machine runs the mobile agent code. Father machine must guaranty the legitimacy of the generated code to the foster machine and the foster machine accepts to foster the code accordingly. The research also includes a critical analysis of the proposed protocol.