MARKET INFORMATION AGENT SYSTEM (MIAS): SECURITY AND RELIABILITY ISSUES

Abstract

Mobile agent technology offers a new computing paradigm in which a program, in the form of a software agent, can suspend its execution on a host computer, transfer itself to another agent-enabled host on the network, and resume execution on the new host. Different mobile agent frameworks are being actively developed in the research community. Looking forward, electronic commerce 'and information retrieval are two prospective directions for application of mobile agents. Nevertheless, security and reliability are two crucial concerns for such systems, especially when they are to be used to deal with money transaction. In spite of some more classical reliability and security problems, mobile agent attacks by malicious hosts are a new and the most chal1enging part of the problem unsolved. In this thesis, security and reliability issues of mobile agents, particularly in an electronic environment were discussed. A Mobile Agent for Electronic Commerce called Market Information Agent System (MIAS) was developed using Java Programming Language. Possible security attacks by malicious hosts to MIAS and reliability problems of MIAS were analysed. Specific solutions to prevent these attacks and reliability problems were suggested.