Distributed Security Algorithms for Mobile Agents

The use of mobile agents is becoming increasingly popular when computing in networked environments, ranging from Internet to the Data Grid, both as a theoretical computational paradigm and as a system-supported programming platform. In spite of this, mobile agents systems have been largely ignored by the mainstream distributed computing community. It is only recently that several researchers have started to systematically explore this new and exciting distributed computational universe. In this paper, the authors describe some of interesting problems and solution techniques developed in these investigations in the context of security. In fact, at a practical level, in systems supporting mobile agents, security is the most pressing concern, and possibly the most difficult to address.