Efficient Hierarchical Key Management Scheme for Access Control in the Mobile Agent

Technologies and their applications related to e-commerce have always been the topic of interests to attract researchers and widely discussed. Among them, the use of the mobile agent in e-commerce is a highly potential technology which has accumulated a lot of interests in recent years. Since the mobile agent has high autonomy and mobility, it can move, unbridled, in different execution environments. At the same time, it can automatically detect its current environment and respond accordingly. Finally, it can also carry out work, or tasks assigned to it by its user. The above qualities make the mobile agent very suitable for use in e-commerce. The internet is an open environment. When there is a need to transfer, or exchange confidential information over the internet, the security of the present Internet environment must be improved. Even so, during its execution, a mobile agent needs to roam around the internet between different servers on the internet. At the same time, a mobile agent may also come in contact, or interact with other mobile agents or hosts. Therefore, the users may worry that a mobile agent may not work properly if it meets with a malicious program, or if it is tampered with by a malicious host, or that confidential information carried by the mobile agent may be stolen by other agents. To ensure the safety of mobile agents on the internet, this paper proposes a security scheme suitable for use to mobile agents: The scheme includes access control and key management to ensure the security and confidentiality of information and the system. In view of the access control and key management scheme for mobile agents proposed by Volker and Mehrdad[1], this paper proposes a new scheme that uses the concepts of polynomial interpolation formula[19], the hierarchy structure and the superkey[8] to improve the previous security schemes which need a large amount of space for the mobile agent. According to this paper's security and performance analysis, it is proved that the proposed scheme can efficiently protect the mobile agents.