Introducing Trusted Third Parties to the Mobile Agent Paradigm

The mobile agent paradigm gains ever more acceptance for the creation of distributed applications, particularly in the domain of electronic commerce. In such applications, a mobile agent roams the global Internet in search of services for its owner. One of the problems with this approach is that malicious service providers on the agent’s itinerary can access confidential information contained in the agent or tamper with the agent.In this article we identify trust as a major issue in this context and propose a pessimistic approach to trust that tries to prevent malicious behaviour rather than correcting it. The approach relies on a trusted and tamper-resistant hardware device that provides the mobile agent with the means to protect itself. Finally, we show that the approach is not limited to protecting the mobile agents of a user but can also be extended to protect the mobile agents of a trusted third party in order to take full advantage of the mobile agent paradigm.