Design and Implementation of Inter-operable and Secure Agent Migration Protocol
Shakir-Ullah Shah1,
Jamil Ahmad2, and Najeeb-ur-Rehman3
1Department of Computing and Technology,Iqra University Islamabad, Pakistan
2Department of Computer Science, University of Science and Technology (KUST), Pakistan
3Department of Computer Science, University of Gujrat, Pakistan
Abstract: Mobile agent technology is an active research topic
and has found its uses in various diverse areas ranging from simple personal
assistance to complex distributed big data systems. Its usage permits offline
and autonomous execution as compared to classical distributed systems. The free
roaming nature of agents makes it prone to several security threats during its
transit state, with an added overhead in its interoperability among different
types of platforms. To address these problems, both software and hardware based
approaches have been proposed to ensure protection at various transit points.
However, these approaches do not ensure interoperability and protection to
agents during transit over a channel, simultaneously. In this regard, an agent
requires a trustworthy, interoperable, and adaptive protocol for secure
migration. In this paper, to answer these research issues, we first analyse security
flaws in existing agent protection frameworks. Second, we implemented a novel
migration architecture which is: 1) fully inter-operable compliance to the Foundation
for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) and 2) trustworthy based on Computing
Trusted Platform Module (TPM). The proposed approach is validated by testing on
software TPM of IBM, JSR321, and jTPMTools as TPM and Trusted Computing
Software Stack (TSS) interfaces, JADE-agent framework and 7Mobility Service
(JIPMS). Validation is also performed on systems bearing physical TPM-chips.
Moreover, some packages of JIPMS are also modified by embedding our proposed
approach into their functions. Our performance results show that our approach
merely adds an execution overhead during the binding and unbinding phases.
Keywords: Information Security, Multi-Agent
Systems, Inter-Platform Agent Mobility, JADE, Trusted Computing.
Received October
9, 2018; accepted February 24, 2019