Scout and routed mobile agents

Mobile agents are programs that travel autonomously through a computer network in order to perform some computation or gather information on behalf of a human user or an application. In the last several years numerous applications of mobile agents have emerged, including e-commerce. However, mobile agent paradigm introduces a number security threats both to the agents themselves and to the servers that they visit. This paper introduces two new concepts: a "scout mobile agent", whose primary purpose is to determine the itinerary required for accomplishing a given task, and a "routed mobile agent", which operates with an itinerary known in advance. This enables the routed agent to incorporate several security mechanisms, including a new coupling technique that we propose in this paper and which relies on the "reputation" of the hosts in the itinerary. Together these techniques ensure that the agent succeeds in accomplishing its task with a high probability.