Optimizing Security Computation Cost for Mobile Agent Platforms

This paper focuses on the optimization of computation cost for agent platform, which appears due to complex security operations. Traditionally, a security manager is integrated within an agent platform, which performs these operations for every mobile agent visiting the platform. To reduce the security costs at the agent platform, a detached security manager is used, which performs complex security operations on behalf of multiple agent platforms. The detached security manager is a security controlling authority for a set of agent platforms. It provides load balancing of mobile agents and enables quick agent migration between platforms. A variation of the detached security manager is a distributed security manager which provides fault tolerant and reliability in terms of a security process. A comparison of these variations of security concludes that the gained merits - savings in efficiency and performance -depend very much upon the requirements of the system which adopt it.