Flexible security policies for mobile agent systems

Mobile Agent (MA) technology raises significant security concerns and requires a thorough security framework with a wide range of strategies and mechanisms for the protection of both agent platform and MA against possibly malicious reciprocal behaviour. The security infrastructure should have the ability to flexibly and dynamically offer different solutions to achieve different qualities of security service depending on application requirements. Modern inter-organisational environments require sophisticated security policies that are difficult to implement in current MA platforms where policies are often directly hard-coded into applications, thus making difficult the reconfiguration required at any policy change. The paper proposes to integrate a policy-based framework within an MA system in order to flexibly model and control agent behaviour according to application specific requirements. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V.