How a Secure and Open Mobile Agent Framework Suits Electronic Commerce Applications

The Mobile Agent (MA) paradigm seems able to support effectively distributed applications in open and heterogeneous environments, and application areas such as ecommerce appear to be of particular interest. However, MA technology has to answer to the requirements of security and interoperability to achieve wide deployment, especially in e-commerce applications. The paper focuses on security and interoperability, and describes a Secure and Open Mobile Agent (SOMA) programming environment where both requirements are main design objectives. On the one hand, SOMA is based on a thorough security model and provides a wide range of mechanisms and tools to build and enforce flexible security policies. On the other hand, the SOMA framework permits to interoperate with different application components designed with different programming styles. SOMA grants interoperability by closely considering compliance with the OMG CORBA and MASIF standards. In particular, the paper presents a SOMA-based e-marketplace that stresses to the limit the security and interoperability issues and that has served as a testbed for the validation of SOMA security and interoperability support.