Affiliations: Connectivity Lab., Digital Media R&D Center, Samsung
Electronics Co., Ltd, 416, Maetan-3Dong, Yeongtong-Gu, Suwon City, Gyeonggi-Do,
South Korea. E-mail: [email protected] | Center for Secure and Dependable Systems, University
of Idaho, Moscow, ID 83844, USA. E-mail: {jimaf,
harrison}@cs.uidaho.edu
Abstract: We propose a security approach for mobile agents, which protects
mobile agents from malicious hosts. Our new approach prevents privacy attacks
and integrity attacks to mobile agents from malicious hosts. It is an extension
of mobile cryptography that removes many problems found in the original ideas
of mobile cryptography while preserving most of the benefits. Although the
original idea of mobile cryptography allowed direct computations without
decryptions on encrypted mobile agents, it did not provide any practical ways
of implementation due to the fact that no homomorphic encryption schemes are
found for their approach. Our approach provides a practical idea for
implementing mobile cryptography by suggesting a hybrid method that mixes a
function composition technique and a homomorphic encryption scheme that we have
found. Like the original mobile cryptography, our approach will encrypt both
code and data including state information in a way that enables direct
computation on encrypted data without decryption. We believe that our approach
is a viable and practical means to address security problems such as integrity
and privacy attacks to mobile agents.
Keywords: mobile agent system, security, encryption, privacy, homomorphism
