A dynamic policy based security architecture for mobile agents

Mobile agents are undoubtedly the upcoming trend in the agent community. As their use is increasing, security problems are coming forth. A mobile agent must address several security issues. An agent may be malicious, the platform on which it executes may carry on sinister activities on it or the agent may be harmed by another malicious agent. Most of the security approaches do not provide any flexibility or dynamic decision making. Therefore, security threats increase further. In our paper, we suggest an approach that uses dynamic ontology based policies to enforce security in platforms as well as in mobile agents. The approach is a hybrid one which utilizes other security measures as well. We have also evaluated the approach on software quality parameters other than security like portability, flexibility and efficiency. The results have been satisfactory.