Access Control For Mobile Agents Sudipta Rakshit University of Central Florida, Spring 2002

Concepts Mobile Agent (MA): - Autonomous, executable program that can migrate on its own. Access Control: - Authentication of a request to use a resource and Authorization of the request

How it works The mobile agent visits one or several machines and either performs some task by itself or asks some resident program to perform the task for it (MA).

Problems Malicious hosts and/or code: - the host may change certain critical portion of the code and/or vice versa

Travel Agent Example Airline 2Airline 1 Travel Agent Customer Request(1) Result(5) MA(3) MA(2) MA(4)

Objective Objective: - 1.To design and implement an access control policy for the simple 2-3 servers system above. 2. To provide an access control framework for a more distributed system

References “Authentication in Distributed Systems: Theory and Practice”, B. Lampson, M. Abadi, M. Burrows, and E. Wobber. ACM Trans. Computer Systems 10, 4 (Nov. 1992), pp lampson.pdf?key1=138874&key2= &coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID= &CFTOKEN = “Authentication for Mobile Agents”, Shimshon Berkovits, Joshua D. Guttman, and Vipin Swarup. LNCS 1419, pp “Linda in Context”, Nicholas Carriero and David Gelernter. Communications of the ACM April 1989, Volume 32 Issue 4, pp “Making Tuple Spaces Safe for Heterogeneous Distributed Systems”, N. H. Minsky, Y. M. Minsky and V. Ungureanu, ACM SAC 2000: Special Track on Coordination Models, Languages and Applications, Como, Italy, April, 2000, pp minsky.pdf?key1=335748&key2= &coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID= &CFTOKEN= http://delivery.acm.org/ /340000/335748/p218- minsky.pdf?key1=335748&key2= &coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID= &CFTOKEN=

Pointers to References 1. "Authentication for Mobile Agents" by Shimshon Berkovits, Joshua Guttman and Vipin Swarum LNCS vol 1419 pp "Making Tuple Spaces Safe for Heterogeneous Distributed Systems" Naftaly Minsky, Yaron Minsky and Victoria Ungureanu minsky.pdf?key1=335748&key2= &coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID= & CFTOKEN= minsky.pdf?key1=335748&key2= &coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID= & CFTOKEN= "Linda in Context" by Nicholas Carriero and David Gelernter....I am not providing the pointer to this paper as this one basically deals with how Linda works. 4. "Authentication in Distributed Systems" Lampson, Abdi, Burrows and Wobber. lampson.pdf?key1=138874&key2= &coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID= &CFTOKEN= http://delivery.acm.org/ /140000/138874/p265- lampson.pdf?key1=138874&key2= &coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID= &CFTOKEN=