An Authentication Protocol For Mobile Agents Using Bilinear Pairings

A mobile agent is a mobile program capable of maintaining its execution states as it migrates between different execution platforms. A key security problem in the mobile agent paradigm is that of trust: How to ensure that the past itinerary (of execution platforms) claimed by the agent is correct. This is necessary in order to establish a reasonable level of trust for the agent before granting execution privileges. In this paper we describe a protocol using bilinear pairings that enables trust relationships to be formed between agent platforms in an ad-hoc manner without actively involving any trusted third party. This protocol can be used to authenticate agents before granting execution privileges. The main idea behind our approach is the concept of ‘one-way’ chaining. Our scheme has chosen ciphertext security assuming the hardness of the Bilinear Diffie Hellman Problem (BDHP).