Anchor Toolkit - a secure mobile agent system

Mobile agent technology facilitates intelligent operation insoftware systems with less human interaction. Major challenge todeployment of mobile agents include secure transmission of agents andpreventing unauthorized access to resources between interacting systems,as either hosts, or agents, or both can act maliciously. The Anchortoolkit, designed by LBNL, handles the transmission and secure managementof mobile agents in a heterogeneous distributed computing environment. Itprovides users with the option of incorporating their security managers.This paper concentrates on the architecture, features, access control anddeployment of Anchor toolkit. Application of this toolkit in a securedistributed CVS environment is discussed as a case study