A review of security techniques for mobile agents

Mobile Agents have become a promising technology in design, implementation and maintenance of Distributed Computing Systems, as they can travel form one node to another along with their internal state. Mobile agents are capable of performing tasks which need a lot of configuration. These days, mobile agents are widely used in number of applications because of their intelligence. Although they possess intelligence but exposing them to the distributed systems increase threat to mobile agent security. There are number of attacks that have been identified in mobile agent systems. At first, this paper discusses various types of attacks such as attacks against agents, attacks against platform etc. We then give a detailed analysis of different techniques that have been proposed by researchers for preventing attacks as well as detecting them. Finally, we give a conclusion with the suggestion of appropriate countermeasure.