A Study of Key Security Threats and Countermeasures in Mobile Agent Systems

Mobile agent is a new kind of network computing paradigm in the field of distributed computing. Because of its distinguished advantages, such as asynchrony,autonomy,mobility,mobile agent is likely to become the dominant approach in network applications. However,with the popu1arity of mobile agent technology,more and more challenges come from those possible security threats in mobile agent systems. Starting from a detailed analysis of these security threats on mobile agent systems,we describe and compare the primary countermeasures for mobile agent security. Some representative mobile agent systems are introduced and their security mechanisms are evaluated.