Classification of malicious host threats in mobile agent computing

  • Authors:

  • Elmarie Bierman;Elsabe Cloete

  • Affiliations:

  • Technikon Pretoria;University of South Africa

  • Venue:
  • SAICSIT '02 Proceedings of the 2002 annual research conference of the South African institute of computer scientists and information technologists on Enablement through technology
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Full-scale adoption of mobile agent technology in untrustworthy network environments, such as the Internet, has been delayed by several security complexities [Montanari, 2001]. Presently, there is a large array of security issues and sub-issues within mobile agent computing that makes it tough to distinguish between different types of problems, and therefore also interfere with the definition of suitable solutions. Literature addressing the full range of problems is limited and mostly discusses single security threats or subsets of security problems and their possible solutions. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the different security threats that can possibly be imposed on agents by malicious hosts, and then provide a classification of these threats before we describe the current solution approaches that are implemented to address the identified problems. By providing such a classification we were able to identify specific gaps in current research efforts, and enable researchers to systematically focus their attention on different classes of solutions to remedy these threats.