Applications of mobile agents and related security issues

The mobile agent (MA) paradigm with its properties of autonomy, asynchronicity, and local resource exploitation suits the needs of many distributed applications. The typical applications for MAs include information retrieval, e-commerce, mobile computing, and network management. However, there are many security issues associated with this technology. In this paper, we give an overview of MA and their applications, and discuss the security vulnerabilities at both the agent level and host/agent server level.