Technical Report TR-1999-09

BibliographyHohl, Fritz: A Protocol to Detect Malicious Hosts Attacks by Using Reference States.
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Technical Report No. 1999/09.
17 pages, german.
CR-SchemaE.3 (Data Encryption)
D.4.6 (Operating Systems Security and Protection)
C.2 (Computer-Communication Networks)
I.2.11 (Distributed Artificial Intelligence)
K.6.5 (Security and Protection)
K.4.4
Keywordsmobile; agents; security
Abstract

To protect mobile agents from attacks by their execution environments, or hosts, one class of protection mechanisms uses "reference states" to detect modification attacks. Reference states are agent states that have been produced by non-attacking, or reference hosts. This paper presents a new protocol using reference states by modifying an existing approach, called "traces". In contrast to the original approach, this new protocol offers a model, where the execution on one host is checked unconditionally and immediately on the next host, regardless of whether this host is trusted or untrusted. This modification preserves the qualitative advantages like asynchronous execution, but also introduces two new problems: input to the execution session on one host cannot be held secret to a second host, and collaboration attacks of two consecutive hosts are possible. The overhead needed for the protocol roughly doubles the cost of the mobile agent execution.

Full text and
other links
HTML (generated from PostScript)
Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Parallel and Distributed High-Performance Systems, Distributed Systems
Entry dateJanuary 25, 2000
   Publ. Computer Science