Mitsuru Oshima

A security model for Aglets

Mobile agents offer a new paradigm for distributed computation, but their potential benefits must be weighed against the very real security threats they pose. These threats originate not just in malicious agents but in malicious hosts as well. For example, if there is no mechanism to prevent attacks, a host can implant its own tasks into an agent or modify the agents state. This can lead in turn to theft of the agents resources if it has to pay for the execution of tasks, or to loss of the agents reputation if its state changes from one host to another in ways that alter its behavior in negative ways. Aglets are mobile agents developed at IBMs Tokyo Research Laboratory. The article describes a security model for the Aglets development environment that supports flexible architectural definition of security policies.

MASIF: The OMG Mobile Agent System Interoperability Facility

MASIF is a standard for mobile agent systems which has been adopted as an OMG technology. It is an early attempt to standardize an area of industry that, even though popular in the recent past, still has not caught on. In its short history MASIF has raised interest in industry and academia. There are already a number of projects pursuing MASIF reference implementation. MASIF addresses the interfaces between agent systems, not between agent applications and the agent system. Even though the former seem to be more relevant for application developers, it is the latter that impact interoperability between different agent systems. This paper describes two sets of interfaces that constitute MASIF: MAFAgentSystem and MAFFinder (the acronym MAF is used for historical reasons). MASIF extensively addresses security. The paper provides a brief description of MASIF and its interfaces, data types and data structures.

Mobile agents with Java: The Aglet API

Java, the language that changed the Web overnight, offers some unique capabilities that are fueling the development of mobile agent systems. In this article we will show what exactly it is that makes Java such a powerful tool for mobile agent development. We will also draw attention to some shortcomings in Java language systems that have implications for the conceptual design and use of Java-based mobile agent systems. Last, but not least, we will introduce the aglet – a Java-based agile agent. We will give an overview of the aglet and, its application programming interface, and present a real-world example of its use in electronic commerce.

MASIF: the OMG mobile agent system interoperability facility

MASIF is a standard for mobile agent systems which has been adopted as an OMG technology. It is an early attempt to standardize an area of industry that, even though popular in the recent past, still has not caught on. In its short history MASIF has raised interest in industry and academia. There are already a number of projects pursuing MASIF reference implementation. MASIF addresses the interfaces between agent systems, not between agent applications and the agent system. Even though the former seem to be more relevant for application developers, it is the latter that impact interoperability between different agent systems. This paper describes two sets of interfaces that constitute MASIF: MAFAgentSystem and MAFFinder (the acronym MAF is used for historical reasons). MASIF extensively addresses security. The paper provides a brief description of MASIF and its interfaces, data types and data structures.

Aglets: Programming Mobile Agents in Java

Mobile agents are programs that can be dispatched from one computer and delivered to a remote computer for execution. Arriving at the remote computer, they present their credentials and obtain access to local services and data. They also provide a single uniform paradigm for distributed object computing, encompassing synchrony and asynchrony, message-passing and object-passing, and stationary objects and mobile objects. In this paper, we describe our Java-based mobile agents called Aglets and present its programming interface, called Java Aglet API.

Infrastructure for Mobile Agents: Requirements and Design

Mobile agent technology makes it possible to reduce network traffic, overcome network latencies and enhance robustness and fault-tolerant capabilities of distributed applications. However, it is sometimes difficult or even impossible to take full advantage of these technical benefits because of the lack of an appropriate infrastructure for overcoming problems related to connectivity (e.g. access through firewalls), security, location transparency, and use of proprietary tools. This paper discusses these problems and introduces the requirements for various infrastructure components and their implementation with the aim of enhancing the practicality and accelerating the deployment of mobile agents.

Introduction to mobile agents

This article will lead you into the world of mobile agents, an emerging technology that makes it much easier to design, implement and maintain distributed systems. You will find that mobile agents reduce network traffic and provide an effective means of overcoming network latency. Perhaps most important, through their ability to operate asynchronously and independently of the process that created them, they help you to construct highly robust and fault-tolerant systems thereby directly or indirectly benefiting the end user.Read on and let us introduce you to software agents, including mobile as well as stationary agents. We will explain the benefits of mobile agents and demonstrate the impact they have on the design of distributed systems. This article then concludes with a brief overview of some contemporary mobile agent systems.