Replication Strategies of Mobile Agents for Autonomous Vulnerability Mitigation

Tactical ad hoc networks are an essential part of the military doctrine Network Centric Warfare (NCW). Automatically established networks of small mobile computers and devices provide soldiers with information necessary to accomplish their mission. Hostile forces may exploit software vulnerabilities in order to obstruct military missions or eavesdrop mission-specific information. A vulnerability scanner and management system is a pro-active countermeasure to prevent the exploitation of known software vulnerabilities. We propose the usage of Mobile Agents for the mitigation of single very critical vulnerabilities because tactical ad hoc networks may not have permanently existing paths to a network management centre. In our concept, the Mobile Agents autonomously determine the path for visiting a given list of nodes based on the connectivity in the ad hoc network. The speed of applying a vulnerability mitigation to all nodes of the network is an important factor for the network security. Therefore, we propose different replication strategies for Mobile Agents. By these different strategies it is possible to adjust speed and network overhead of applying a vulnerability mitigation in the network.