DESIGN, IMPLEMENTATION AND EVALUATION OF TRUST MANAGEMENT ARCHITECTURE FOR MOBILE AGENT SECURITY

Abstract

Recently, trust has been recognized as an important factor for mobile agent security and the initial research effort has focused on developing trust models. With the proposed trust management architecture, we demonstrate how one can derive trust enhanced security solutions to provide an improved level of security for mobile agents, which are not possible with security manager alone. In this thesis, we have developed a trust management architecture for trust enhanced mobile agent security, incorporating a novel trust model, which is capable of cap `•ryng .. various types of trust relationships that exist in a mobile agent system. It provide mechanisms for trust evaluation, recommendation and update for trust decisions. We have designed several algorithms, which demonstrate how one can derive, the trust enhanced security solutions for both agent and host protection with the proposed trust management architecture. Leveraging on trust knowledge and forming it as part of the security decisions, the proposed architecture possesses several desirable emerging properties that enable it to provide an improved level of security for mobile agents, which is not possible with traditional security measures alone. We have designed and implemented a platform independent Trust Management(TM) layer in Java, which is generic enough to be applied to any distributed system. The TM_ layer is transparent from the security layer and provides functionality to aid it in order to take trustworthy decisions. We have tested, verified and evaluated the model by comparing its performance with and without trust for varying proportions of malicious activities. Significant performance enhancements have been achieved by the inclusion of our Trust Management layer for both agent & host security — which is a step forward in solving this widely -recognized hard problem. We have used the Java programming language to implement the Trust Management layer and have integrated the TM layer into the Aglets mobile agent system by IBM. We have finally tested the whole system on 6 Intel Pentium IV based systems running on WIN NT