A flexible policy architecture for mobile agents

Recent advances in distributed computing has lead software agents to be mobile and/or composed of distributed resources. In order to perform certain tasks, mobile agents may require access to resources available on remote systems. Although appealing in terms of system design and extensibility, mobile agents are a security risk and require strong access control. Further, the mobile code environment is fluid where resources located on a host may change rapidly, necessitating an extensible security model. This makes difficult to dynamically change agent ability and host security strategies in order to adapt to evolving conditions of the execution environment. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a policy-based secure mobile agent platform (SECMAP). The platform makes use of agent and host policies for security and flexibility concerns. Its main strength is that it allows security policies to be specified or modified dynamically at runtime, resulting in high adaptability of agents and hosts to varying system state and requirements.