Authentication for Mobile Agents

In mobile agent systems, program code together with some process state can autonomously migrate to new hosts. Despite its many practical benefits, mobile agent technology results in significant new security threats from malicious agents and hosts. In this paper, we propose a security architecture to achieve three goals: certification that a server has the authority to execute an agent on behalf of its sender; flexible selection of privileges, so that an agent arriving at a server may be given the privileges necessary to carry out the task for which it has come to the server; and state appraisal, to ensure that an agent has not become malicious as a consequence of alterations to its state. The architecture models the trust relations between the principals of mobile agent systems and includes authentication and authorization mechanisms.