C. Chellappan

Performance analysis of mobile agent failure recovery in e-service applications

In recent years, most of researchers are incorporating the mobile agents in most of the e-service applications especially in e-learning to improve the network latency and to reduce the network traffic. On the other side, the security issues degrade the mobile agent usage. The main intention of the attacker is to kill or modify the behavior of the agent in the middle of the journey to degrade the trustiness of the agent environment. To recover the killed or modified mobile agent in the original form, this paper proposed a novel K-response recovery model. For K-response recovery model, every host dispatching the agent should have the clone to recover the agent and send the response to the preceding host about the agent status (alive). During the recovery of the mobile agent all the components (agent code, itinerary, credential information, collected information and state) are able to recover. The K-response model is experimented for the 1-response scenario and its experimental results proved that the preceding host will get the response with in the time out period of the clone.

Advanced mobile agent security models for code integrity and malicious availability check

Mobile agent technology is an emerging paradigm in distributed computing environment and it holds a potential status in the relevant research field due to its unique capabilities like flexibility, dynamic customization and robust interaction in unreliable networks. But the limited security perspectives and shortfalls of the mobile agent environments degrade its usage in a variety of application domains. Even though some of the protection models are available for protecting the environments, they are not efficient in handling the security issues. To make the mobile agent environment secure, this paper proposed advanced models to improve the efficiency of the existing Malicious Identification Police model for scanning the incoming agent to detect the malicious activities and to overcome the availability of vulnerabilities in the existing Root Canal algorithm for code integrity checks. The MIP model is extended with the policy to differentiate the agent owners in the distributed environment and the Root Canal algorithm is improved as eXtended Root Canal algorithm. The experimental results of the advanced models show that though these mechanisms take more time complexity than the existing malicious identification police model and Root Canal model, these models are efficient in protecting the agent code integrity and scanning the agent for malicious activities. Also the new models possess less time complexity compared to the other related existing models in the secure mobile agent environment.

Artificial immune system based mobile agent platform protection

An emerging technology for systems to communicate efficiently in the distributed environment is the mobile agent. The features of the mobile agent are too big when compared with the static agent and conventional communication system. However, the security issues of the mobile agent and mobile agent platform lags its usage. Even though the protection models are available for the mobile agent environment, the vulnerabilities still exist or the models need more computational time. To mitigate these issues related with the agent platform, this paper proposed an artificial immune system (AIS) based model. The proposed model will give the separation of duties and clones to handle multiple foreign agents simultaneously to achieve the computational efficiency. The experimental results and the constructed results from the experimental results have proved that this proposed model will consume less computational time when compared with the existing models. It will detect the malicious agent by extracting and matching the patterns with the available malicious patterns and also it can identify the new malicious patterns through monitoring the agent process.

Protection of Mobile Agent Platform through Attack Identification Scanner (AIS) by Malicious Identification Police (MIP)

Information retrieval by the mobile agent is more flexible than the traditional communication paradigm but it is very vulnerable to a variety of attacks. Various attacks in the mobile agent environment are identified and protected. Agent platform protection is the major concern in the environment. Existing models to protect platform have the drawbacks. So, we proposed the attack identification scanner (AIS) to scan and kill the malicious agent from the malicious host in the distributed environment using MIP.

Recovery model for free-roaming mobile agent against multiple attacks

In the free-roaming mobile agent system, the recovery model is complicated then the itinerary mobile agent systems and the distributed Database environment. This paper proposes the recovery model for free-roaming mobile agent and its collected offers by the k-response methods to improve the tolerance of the agent failure or occupied by the malicious host. In the k-response model it is able to identify whether the agent is migrated from one to another host or not. If it is not migrated than the genuine host resent the agent once again to the host next to the malicious host and mentioned in the list that the host which is not migrated the agent from them.

Protecting free-roaming mobile agent against multiple colluded truncation attacks

Mobile agent environment is one of the emerging technology to reduce the network traffic. Various security issues are identified and protected. Now the new security issue in this environment is the multiple colluded truncation attacks in the Free-roaming mobile agents. This paper proposes the identity verification mechanism to protect the multiple colluded truncation attacks The identification is verified from the beginning dummy offer of the creator of the agent.

Free-roaming mobile agent (FRoMA) protection against multiple attacks

Network traffic is the major concern in distributed computing. To reduce this, mobile agent technology is used in the distributed environment. Even though mobile agent is used in the distributed environment, the traffic is not reduced more due to more number of dispatches or migration from the source host to the remote hosts. To reduce the traffic more than the simple mobile agent, the free roaming mobile agent model is introduced in the network. Despite from its advantage, free roaming mobile agent faces various security issues like colluded attacks, truncation attacks and more. We proposed the id verification model to protect the free roaming mobile agent against the colluded and truncation attacks. This paper also proposes the recovery model for free-roaming mobile agent and its collected offers by the K-response model. It is to improve the fault tolerance of the agent failure or agent occupied by the malicious host by identifying whether the agent is dispatched to next host or not.

Identifying the split personality of the malicious host in the mobile agent environment

Mobile agents are software programs capable of working autonomously and automatically. Mobile agents in the network will be the problem for the remote host if it is a malicious agent and also problem to the agent while it visits the malicious host. In this paper, we propose a model for identifying the split personality of the malicious hosts (machine attacks the agent) using the hash function comparison. Identifying the attack is better than the protection because it will identify the attacker is to remove from the environment.