Proceedings of the Fifteenth Midwest

In this work we examine mobile autonomous agent technology and its ability to effectively fight a computer virus attack on a network. A mobile agent is an autonomous agent that has the ability to transfer and reproduce itself on other computers within a network [Kotz, 99]. A computer virus is a malicious computer program that infects host systems and replicates itself to other host systems [Hoffman,90]. Using mobile agents, we simulate a virus attack on a small, isolated network testbed. We then simulate a virus fighter that successfully detects the attack and distributes a patch across the network. We employ the Java Aglet environment in our implementation of mobile agents [Lange, 98]. In this paper, we present both virus propagation and virus detection algorithms, simulation details, a discussion of the aglet test environment architecture, and detailed analysis of test infection results.