Abstract
Mobile objects have gained a lot of attention in research and industry in the recent past, but they also have a long history. Security is one of the key requirements of mobile objects, and one of the most researched characteristics related to mobility. Resource management has been somewhat neglected in the past, but it is being increasingly addressed, in both the context of security and QoS. In this paper we place a few systems supporting mobile objects in perspective based upon how they address security and resource management. We start with the theoretical model of Actors that supports concurrent mobile objects in a programming environment. Then we describe task migration for the Mach microkernel, a case of mobile objects supported by an operating system. Using the OMG MASIF standard as an example, we then analyze middleware support for mobile objects. Mobile Objects and Agents (MOA) system, is an example of middleware level support based on Java. The active networks project, Conversant, supports object mobility at the communication protocol level. We summarize these projects, comparing their security and resource management, and conclude by deriving a few general observations on how security and resource management have been applied and how they might evolve in the future.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
ACTS Domain 5, Agent Cluster Baseline Document, T. Magedanz (ed.), January 1998.
G. Agha, “Actors: A model of concurrent computation in distributed systems,” Arti.cial Intelligence Series, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1986.
G. Agha and N. Jamali, “Concurrent programming for distributed arti.cial intelligence,” in Gerhard Weiss (ed.), Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Arti.cial Intelligence, chap. 12, pp. 505-534, MIT press: Cambridge, MA, 1999.
G. Agha, S. Fr¨olund, W. Kim, R. Panwar, A. Patterson, and D. Sturman, “Abstraction and modularity mechanisms for concurrent computing,” Parallel and Distributed Technology, IEEE Comp. Soc., vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 3-15, 1993.
G. Agha, I. Mason, S. Smith, and C. Talcott, “A foundation for actor computation,” J. Functional Programming, vol. 7, pp. 1-72, 1996.
P. Amaral, C. Jacqemot, P. Jensen, R. Lea, and A. Mirowski, “Transparent object migration in COOL-2,” in Proc. ECOOP, June 1992.
W. Athas and N. Boden, “Cantor: an actor programming system for scientific computing,” in G. Agha, P. Wegner, and A. Yonezawa (eds.), Proc. NSF Workshop on Object-Based Concurrent Programming, pp 66-68, ACM, April 1989.
D. Balfanz and L. Gong, “Experience with secure multi-processing in Java,” Technical Report 560-97, Department of Computer Science, Princeton University.
J. Baumann, F. Hohl, K. Rothermel, and M. Straßer, “Mole-Concepts of a mobile agent system,” WWW Journal, Special Issue on Applications and Techniques of Web Agents, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 123-137, 2-13, 1998.
P. Bernadat, D. Lambright, and F. Travostino, “Towards a resource safe Java,” IEEE Workshop on Programming Languages for Real-Time Industrial Applications (PLRTIA), December 1998.
B. Bershad, S. Savage, P. Pardyak, E. G. Sirer, M. Fiuczinski, D. Becker, C. Chambers, and S. Eggers, “Extensibility, safety and performance in the SPIN operating system,” in Proc. 15th Symp. Operating Systems Principles, pp. 267-284.
S. Bhattacharjee, K. Calvert, and E. Zegura, “On active networking and congestion,” Technical Report GIT-CC-96-02, College of Computing, Georgia Tech.
J. Bradshaw, Software Agents, AAAI Press/The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1997.
M. Breugst and T. Magedanz, “Mobile agents-enabling technology for active intelligent network implementation,” IEEE Network, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 53-60, 1998.
J.-P. Briot, “Actalk: A testbed for classifying and designing actor languages in the Smalltalk-80 environment,” in Proc. Eur. Conf. Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP'89), pp. 109-129, July 1989.
C. Bryce and J. Vitek, “The JavaSeal mobile agent kernel,” in Proc. First International Symposium on Agent Systems and Applications and Third International Symposium on Mobile Agents (ASA/MA'99), October 1999, pp. 103-117.
D. Chang and S. Covaci, “The OMG mobile agent facility: A submission,” in Proc. First Int. Workshop on Mobile Agents, Lecture Notes in Computer Science no. 1219, Springer-Verlag: Berlin, April 1997, pp. 98-110.
D. M. Chess, B. Grossof, C. Harrison, D. Levine, C. Parris, and G. Tsudik, “Mobile agents: Are they a good idea,” IBM Research Report, RC 19887, October 1994.
CORBA Security, “The OMG Speci.cation,” OMG Document Number 95-12-1.
Common Secure Interoperability, “The OMG Speci.cation,” OMG Document Number; or-bos/ 96-06-20.
D. Eager, E. Lazowska, and J. Zahorjan, May “Dynamic load sharing in homogeneous distributed systems,” IEEE Trans. Software Engineering, vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 662-675, 1986.
FIPA http://drogo.cselt.it/.pa/.
M. Fiuczynski and B. Bershad, “An extensible protocol architecture for application-speci.c networking,” in Proc. 1996 Winter USENIX Conference, San Diego, CA, January 1996, pp. 55-64.
B. Ford, M. Hibler, J. Lepreau, P. Tullman, G. Back, and S. Clawson, “Microkernels meet recursive virtual machines,” in Proc. USENIX Second Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'96), Seattle WA, October 1996, pp. 137-152.
B. Ford, M. Hibler, J. Lepreau, R. McGrath, and P. Tullman, “Interface and execution models in the.uke kernel,” Proc. USENIX Third Symp. Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'99), New Orleans, LA, February 1999, pp. 101-116.
G. Glass, “ObjectSpace Voyager Core Package Technical Overview,” ObjectSpace, White Paper, Reprinted in [54].
Grasshopper, http://www.ikv.de/products/grasshopper.html.
R. Gray, D. Kotz, G. Cybenko, and D. Rus, “D'Agents: security in a multiple-language, mobileagent system,” in Giovanni Vigna (ed.), Mobile Agent Security, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag: Berlin, 1998.
A. Grimshaw, et al. “The legion vision of a worldwide virtual computer,” CACM, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 39-45, 1997.
C. Gunter, M. Hicks, P. Kakkar, J. Moore, S. Nettles, and J. Carl, “PLAN: Language-based safety and security for active networks,” SOSP 97, October 5-8, 1997, Saint Malo, France.
D. Hagimont and L. Ismail, “A protection scheme for mobile agents on Java,” in Proc. 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, September 1997.
J. Hartman, L. Peterson, A. Bavier, P. Bigot, P. Bridges, B. Montz, R. Piltz, and T. Proebsting, “Joust: A platform for communication-oriented liquid software.” TR97-16. Department of Computer Science, The University of Arizona.
C. Hewitt, “Viewing control structures as patterns of passing messages,” J Arti.cial Intelligence, vol. 8-3, pp. 323-364, 1977.
P. Homburg, M. van Steen, and A. Tanenbaum, “An Architecture for A Wide Area Distributed System,” in Proc. Seventh SIGOPS European Workshop, Connemara Ireland, September 1996, pp. 75-82.
K. Hwang, W. Croft, B. Wah, F. Briggs, W. Simons, and C. Coates, “A Unix-based local computer network with load balancing,” IEEE Computer, vol. 15, pp. 55-66, 1982.
R. Jaeger, R. Duncan, T. Lavian, J. Hollingsworth, and F. Travostino, “Dynamic classi.cation in silicon based forwarding engine environments,” in Proc. LANMAN'99 Workshop, 1999.
M. Jones, “Interposition agents: transparently interposing user code at the system interface,” in Proc. 4th ACM Symp. Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'93), Asheville, NC, December 1993, pp. 80-93.
D. Johansen, R. van Renesse, and F. Schneider, “Operating system support for mobile agents,” in Proc. 5th. IEEE HOTOS Workshop, May 4-5, 1995.
E. Jul, H. Levy, N. Hutchinson, and A. Black, “Fine-grained mobility in the emerald system,” ACM Trans. Computer Systems, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 109-133, 1988.
D. Kafura, M. Mukherji, and G. Lavender, “ACT++ 2.0: A Class library for concurrent programming in C++ using actors,” J. Object-Oriented Programming vol. 6, no. 6, pp. 47-62, 1993.
C. Kaufman, R. Perlman, and M. Speciner, Network Security, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1995.
Kaffe Java virtual machine. http://www.transvirtual.com/products/downloads.html.
W. A. Kornfeld and C. Hewitt, “The scienti.c community metaphor,” IEEE Trans. System, Man, and Cybernetics vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 24-33, 1981.
D. Kotz, et al., “Mobile agents for mobile internet computing,” IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 58-67, 1997.
P. Krueger and R. Chawla, “The stealth distributed scheduler,” in Proc. 11th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, June 1991, pp. 336-343.
D. Lange and M. Oshima, “Mobile agents with Java: The Aglet API,” World Wide Web, vol. 1, no. 3, 1998.
P. Maes, “Computational re.ection,” Ph.D. Thesis, Vrije University, Arti.cial Intelligence Laboratory, Technical Report, no. 87-2, 1987.
C. Manning, “Introduction to programming actors in acore,” in C. Hewitt and G. Agha, (eds.), Towards Open Information Systems Science, chap 2, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1990, pp. 33-80.
D. Milojicic, Load Distribution, Vieweg Verlag, Advanced Studies in Computer Science, Wiesbaden, Germany, 1994.
D. Milojicic, M. Breugst, I. Busse, J. Campbell, S. Covaci, B. Friedman, K. Kosaka, D. Lange, K. Ono, M. Oshima, C. Tham, S. Virdhagriswaran, and J. White, “MASIF-The OMG mobile agent system interoperability facility,” Personal Technologies vol. 2 Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1998, pp. 117-129. (Also appeared in the Proc. International Workshop on Mobile Agents, Stuttgart, September 1998, pp. 50-67.)
D. Milojicic, F. Douglis, Y. Paindaveine, R. Wheeler, and S. Zhou, “Process migration survey,” ACM Computing Surveys vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 241-299, 2000.
D. Milojicic, W. LaForge, and D. Chauhan, “Mobile objects and agents, design, implementation and lessons learned,” Distributed Systems Engineering, IEE, vol. 5, 1-14, 1988. Also appeared in the Proc. Fourth USENIX Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies and Systems (COOTS '98), April 27-30, 1998, Santa Fe, New Mexico, pp. 179-194.
D. Milojicic, W. Zint, A. Dangel, and P. Giese, “Task migration on the top of the Mach microkernel,” Proceedings of the USENIX Mach Symposium, pp. 273-290, Santa Fe, USA, April 1993.
D. Milojicic, F. Douglis, and R. Wheeler, Mobility-Processes, Computers, and Agents, Addison Wesley and ACM Press, February 1999.
D. Milojicic, P. Giese, and W. Zint, “Experiences with load distribution on top of the Mach microkernel,” in Proc. 4th USENIX Symposium on Experiences with Distributed and Multiprocessor Systems, San Diego, September 1993, pp. 19-36.
L. Moreau and C. Queinnec, “Distributed computations driven by resource consumption,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Computer Languages (ICCL'98), Chicago, IL, May 1998, pp. 68-77.
M. P. Singh, “Multiagent systems,” Lecture Notes in Arti.cial Intelligence, no. 799, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1994.
R. Needham and M. Schroeder, “Using encryption for authentication in large networks of computers,” Communication of the ACM, vol. 21, pp. 993-999, 1978.
OMG MASIF, OMG TC Document ORBOS/97-10-05.
Open Systems Laboratory, “The actor foundry: A Java-based actor programming environment,” Available for download at http://www-osl.cs.uiuc.edu/ m-astle/foundry.html.
Y. Paindaveine, D. Milojicic, “Process vs. task migration,” in Proc. 29th HIC-SS, January 3-6, 1996, pp. 636-645.
H. Peine and T. Stolpmann, “The Architecture of the Ara platform for mobile agents,” in Proc. First Intl. Workshop on Mobile Agents MA'97, April 7-8. LNCS 1219, Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
L. Rowe and K. Birman, “A Local network based on the UNIX operating system,” IEEE Tran. Software Engineering, vol. SE-8, no. 2, pp. 137-146, 1982.
T. Sander and C. Tschudin, “Towards mobile cryptography,” in Proc. IEEE Symp. Security and Privacy, Spring 1998.
R. Sansom, “Building a secure distributed computer system,” CMU-CS-88-141, Ph.D. Thesis, Carnage Melon University, May 1988.
J. Sebes, “Overview of the architecture of distributed trusted Mach,” in Proc. Second USENIX Mach Symposium, November 1991, pp. 251-262.
J. S. Shapiro, J. M. Smith, and D. J. Farber, “EROS: A fast capability system,” in Proc. 17th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'99), Kiawah Island Resort, December 1999, pp. 170-187.
M. Shapiro, P. Gautron, and L. Mosseri, “Persistence and migration for C++ objects,” in Proc. ECOOP 1989-Eur. Conf. Object-Oriented Programming, July 1989.
E. Sirer, S. Savage, P. Pardyak, G. DeFouw, M. Alapat, and B. Bershad, “Writing an operating system using modula-3,” Workshop on Compiler Support for System Software, February 1996.
M. Swanson, L. Stoller, T. Critchlow, and R. Kessler, “The design of the schizophrenic workstation system,” in Proc. Third USENIX Mach Symposium, Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 1993, pp. 291-306.
J. Tardo and L. Valente, “Mobile agent security and telescript,” in Proc. COMPCON'96, pp. 52-63, February 1996.
D. L. Tennenhouse, J. M. Smith, W. Sincoskie, D. J. Wetherall, and G. J. Minde, “A survey of active network research,” IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 80-86, 1997.
C. Tomlinson, W. Kim, M. Schevel, V. Singh, B. Will, and G. Agha, “Rosette: An object oriented concurrent system architecture,” Sigplan Notices, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 91-93, 1989.
F. Travostino, “Towards an active IP accounting infrastructure,” in Proc. OpenArch 2000 Conf., Tel Aviv, Il, March 2000.
C. Tschudin, “The messenger environment M0-A condensed description,” in Mobile Object Systems: Towards the Programmable Internet, LNCS no. 1222, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, April 1997, pp. 149-156.
G. Vigna (ed.), Mobile Agents Security. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1998.
D. Wetherall, J. Guttag, and D. Tennenhouse, “ANTS: A toolkit for building and dynamically deploying network Protocols,” IEEE OPENARCH'98, San Francisco, CA, April 1998.
D. Wetherall, “Active network vision and reality: Lessons from a capsule-based system,” in Proc. 17th ACM Symp. on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'99), Kiawah Island Resort, December 1999, pp. 64-79.
J. White, “Telescript technology: Mobile agents,” in J. Bradshaw (ed.), Software Agents, AAAI/MIT Press, 1996.
D. Woelk, M. Huhns, and C. Tomlinson, “InfoSleuth agents: The next generation of active objects,” Object Magazine, July/August 1995.
D. Wong, N. Paciorek, T. Walsh, J. DeCelie, M. Young, and B. Peet, “Concordia: An infrastructure for collaborating mobile agents” in Proc. Workshop on Mobile Agents MA'97, pp. 86-97. Berlin, April, 7-8th. LNCS 1219, Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
L. Zhang, V. Jacobson, and S. Floyd, “Adaptive web caching,” http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/AWC/.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Milojicic, D., Agha, G., Bernadat, P. et al. Case Studies in Security and Resource Management for Mobile Object Systems. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 5, 45–79 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013444932711
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013444932711