Integrating Java-based mobile agents into Web servers under security concerns

The paper describes a system architecture which offers the ability to host mobile agents (so-called Web-agents) on a Web server. This is done by a special server extension module called 'server agent environment' (SAE). The agents may access local data of the Web server and may communicate with other Web-agents or with human users. The paper discusses the different security issues that arise in such a system and shows how the author addresses the problems. Concerning system and network security, they present a solution based on security packages, protection domains, and agent capabilities. This provides a flexible way to restrict an agent's possibility to access the local server data or access the network. Since they also aim at providing the SAE as a plug-in for other Web servers, they show how this is supported by the system architecture.