Technical Report TR-1997-03

BibliographyHohl, Fritz: An approach to solve the problem of malicious hosts.
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Technical Report No. 1997/03.
13 pages, english.
CR-SchemaD.4.6 (Operating Systems Security and Protection)
E.3 (Data Encryption)
Abstract

Mobile agents are often described as a promising technology moving towards the vision of a widely distributed scalable electronic market. The deployment of electronic services, especially in the area of electronic commerce, raises essential questions closely related to security issues. This paper tries to address these issues by providing a taxonomy of security domains within mobile agent systems. The identified areas comprise protecting hosts against malicious agents, protecting agents from other agents, protecting hosts from other hosts, and protecting agents from malicious hosts. Whereas the first three security issues can be solved by applying traditional security mech anisms, new security techniques have to be developed to protect agents from malicious hosts. The paper analyzes possible attacks of hosts and presents, based on this analysis, an approach to prevent malicious attacks. The ap proach, which is called Code Mess Up, consists of a combination of two mechanisms: The first mechanism dy namically generates a new and far less understandable version of the agent code. The second mechanism restricts the lifetime of the agent's code and data. It is shown that the application of these two mechanism can significantly enhance the protection of agents against malicious hosts.

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Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Parallel and Distributed High-Performance Systems, Distributed Systems
Entry dateApril 11, 1997
   Publ. Computer Science