A Novel Key Management and Access Control Scheme for Mobile Agent

Abstract

The speed and convenience of the Internet facilitated the development of electronic commerce (e-commerce). E-commerce research and technologies have always drawn the attention of researchers. Among them, the application of mobile agent on e-commerce has drawn much attention in recent years. Mobile agents can roam freely over different execution environments to execute tasks assigned to them. However, a mobile agent may be attacked when it requests services from other servers or when comes in contact with and exchange information with another agents while roaming on the internet. Hence, a mobile agent user may be concerned that his mobile agent could be corrupted or private information tapped and pirated by other agents. To ensure the security of mobile agents in public network environment, this paper proposes a security scheme that is suitable for mobile agents. The scheme includes access control and key management; it is also an improvement on the key management and access control for mobile agent scheme of Volker and Mehrdad. The proposed scheme corrects the drawback in Volker and Mehrdad’s scheme which is the need of a large amount of storage for storing the secret keys. Security and performance analysis of our scheme proves the proposed scheme to be more efficient and secure.