Development of a security framework for HTML5-based mobile agents

Mobile agent technology is a paradigm where a program can move autonomously in the different executable environment of a network. The program is the mobile agent, that can move its code, suspend and resume the execution in the new environment.The use of a mobile agent provides numerous benefits over the traditional paradigm like client-server. It reduces the network traffic, connection time and bandwidth consumption by the moving agent between the client and server. However, the security issue of the mobile agent makes difficult to acquire the benefits. The HTML5-based mobile agent framework was developed in Tampere University of Technology (TUT). The core of this thesis is to secure the mobile agent framework. The security threats to the mobile agent and agent platform are classified to design and implement a secure framework. These threats are the agent attacking platform, platform attacking agent, agent attacking agent and agent system attacked by external entities. This thesis focuses first two threats and provides a solution to protect mobile agent framework against them. The solution uses a signing method that involves salting and hashing of source address to generate signature. Furthermore, the RSA encryption using the static private key of an agent origin server to create a signature. The signature moves along with the agent and it is used to verify the agent source address using a static public key. This verification ensures that particular agent comes from the legitimate source and it is trusted as a non-malicious in the current platform. This solution overcomes the security issues like unauthorized access to the data, changing the agent and platform code, the misuse of others identity, eavesdropping and altering the important information, the excessive use of the resources etc. Also, the implementation helps to minimize the problems in agent mobility, agent and platform communication and identification of agents