Abstract not found

The absence of a trusted computing base for mobile agents poses serious security issues for both the host system and the survivability of the agent. Once a mobile agent is dispatched, asserting anything about the host system, the agent's behavior, or even the agent's existence is difficult to ascertain. In order to employ agents with any degree of confidence, constraints need to be placed on the agent computation since no restraints can be imposed (or assumed) about the host system's hardware or software. This paper presents a faulttolerant approach for increasing an agent owner's confidence in the integrity of its agent. Keywords: Software Fault Tolerance, Mobile Agents, Agent Trustworthiness, and Voting. 1 INTRODUCTION In traditional client-server settings, a central and trusted host communicates with statically bound client processes through either asynchronous messages or synchronous remote procedure calls. Mobile agents extend this communication paradigm by providing a more flex...

For decades, secure operating systems have incorporated mandatory access control (MAC) techniques. Surprisingly, mobile-code platforms such as the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the.NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) have largely ignored these advances and have implemented a far weaker security that does not reliably track ownership and access permissions for individual data items. We have implemented a system that adds MAC to an existing JVM at the granularity of objects. Our system maintains a strict separation between mechanism and policy, thereby allowing a wide range of policies to be enforced. In preliminary benchmarks, we find that the run-time overhead of tracking MAC tags for every object is around 30%. Three important trends have been recently emerging in the field of trustworthy computing. At the application level, more and more code is now being targeted at high-level language runtimes and virtual machines that execute some form of safe, platform-independent bytecode. The most prevalent examples of this are the Java virtual machine[1], and the more recent.NET common language