A NOVEL MOBILE AGENT AUTHENTICATION SCHEME FOR MULTI-HOST ENVIRONMENTS USING SELF-CERTIFIED PAIRING-BASED PUBLIC KEY CRYPTOSYSTEM

The mobile agent technology has been widely proposed for the management of networks and distributed systems. Consequently, the security issues of mobile agents are more and more important. The security issues of mobile agents are classified into two aspects: (1) protecting hosts against unauthorized and hostile agents and (2) protecting mobile agents against malicious hosts. Current researchers mainly focus on protecting mobile agents from malicious users or hosts. This paper proposes an authentication scheme for effectively protecting multiple hosts against unauthorized mobile agents. The proposed scheme employs a proxy signature scheme to design an authentication scheme so that a mobile agent can register only once for multiple services. Multi-host environments are taken into consideration in the proposed scheme for better scalability. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to protect mobile-agent-based hosts for multi-host environments. In summary, this proposed authentication scheme can achieve the requirements of authentication and authorization of mobile agents. Also, the performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme is more desirable to multi-host environments owing to the merits of better scalability and low computational and communicational cost.