Publication Information
V. Gunupudi and S. R. Tate. Design of the SAgent Security Framework for JADE, in Proceedings of the 18th Annual IASTED International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems (PDCS), 2006, pp. 90-95. Security&CryptographyConference
Abstract
In this paper, we present the design of SAgent, a general-purpose mobile agent security framework. SAgent is designed for comprehensive protection of mobile agent computations and data in potentially hostile environments and works with the JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment) platform, a FIPA-compliant multi-agent environment. Using good software engineering design techniques of software reusability and abstraction, SAgent allows agent protection protocols and applications to be developed independently of each other. To accomplish this, a clean conceptual framework is presented which encapsulates in several general class interfaces the common security functionality required by secure agent applications. Since SAgent is designed to generically protect the computations of mobile agent applications, we provide implementations of two secure multiagent protocols that protect the confidentiality of agent data as well as implementations of four methods that protect the integrity of mobile agent data. Experimental results showing the feasibility of these methods are available in separate publications. The goal of SAgent is to provide a framework where proposed theoretical techniques can be used and experimentally evaluated. SAgent allows a new security provider to implement and experiment with new techniques for protecting mobile agents in a well-defined manner and is generic enough to support both software-based and hardware-based protections.