Towards securing network management agent distribution and communication

Network management applications using distributed software agents require secure techniques for agent distribution and communication. Although there are several popular mobile agent environments written in the Java programming language that contend to offer these functions, these packages are generally heavyweight and do not provide a framework for authenticating agent responsibilities within agent systems. This paper describes an agent distribution and communication framework for Java-based software agents. The framework has several key features: (1) a secure mechanism for dispatching agents to selected nodes from secured agent repositories; (2) an operating environment for each agent that depends upon its role-based authenticated security level; (3) object-based, peer-to-peer and peer-to-many communication; (4) provision for encrypted communication; (5) a low-overhead distributed naming directory of agents populating the network; (6) proactive agent monitoring for secure operations; (7) tools for reflective monitoring of agent contents and communication; (8) a lightweight environment that is easy to use while keeping the agents small in size.