A review and future research directions of secure and trustworthy mobile agent-based e-marketplace systems

Purpose – Agent technology has generated a lot of interest in recent years, including mobile agent technology with its advantage of being able to support mobility, which can reduce network latency and dependency on network availability. Therefore, a number of mobile agent-based e-commerce applications have been constructed. Mobile agent-based e-marketplaces are e-commerce trading platforms which represent the business models and processes for buyers and sellers to trade goods and provide services via the extended distributed channels of the Web over the Internet and mobile networks. However, mobile agents introduced a series of security and privacy issues such as the protection of the computing and network platforms and the host that runs the mobile agent against attacks which can harm or use its resources without permission as well as the essential protection necessary to guard mobile agents against malicious hosts that might alter the information it carries when it visits other hosts in its itineraries, and possibly siphon or transfer the client’s privacy information. This raises the need to provide secure and safe information security systems through the use of firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, encryption, authentication and other hardware and software solutions. To solve these problems, we propose a framework which includes safe, secure, trusted and auditable services, as well as forensic mechanisms to provide audit trails for digital evidence of transactions and protection against malicious and illegal activities. Design/methodology/approach – This paper reviews the literature as the foundation and knowledge base for the proposed framework and system of secure and trustworthy mobile agent-based e-marketplaces. It consists of the current state of the art taxonomy for the classified mobile agent-based frameworks for e-marketplace trading, underlying supporting systems, e-payment systems and the essential issues related to auditable and digital forensic services. Findings – The current knowledge shows that there is a serious lack of auditable and digital forensic services to make secure and trustworthy mobile agent-based e-marketplaces systems. We draw conclusions and * Corresponding author & Visiting Professor at Kingston University in the UK highlight further research work which is ongoing and new work that needs to be performed. Originality/value – This paper perceives the needs to define the requirements for secure and trustworthy mobile agent-based e-marketplaces and proposes a framework to design effective systems using the latest techniques and technologies.