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 2 Airline 1

Travel AgentCustomer

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), pp265-310.http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/140000/138874/p265-lampson.pdf?key1=138874&key2=1669592101&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=1545331&CFTOKEN=87451905

• “Authentication for Mobile Agents”, Shimshon Berkovits, Joshua D. Guttman, and Vipin Swarup. LNCS 1419, pp 114-136

http://link.springer.de/link/service/series/0558/papers/1419/14190114.pdf • “Linda in Context”, Nicholas Carriero and David Gelernter. Communications of the ACM April

1989, Volume 32 Issue 4, pp 444-458http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=63337&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=1506807&CFTOKEN=43124044

• “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, 19-21 April, 2000, pp. 218-226.

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/340000/335748/p218-minsky.pdf?key1=335748&key2=5819592101&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=1545331&CFTOKEN=87451905

Pointers to References• 1. "Authentication for Mobile Agents" by Shimshon Berkovits, Joshua Guttman and

Vipin Swarum• LNCS vol 1419 pp 114-136• http://link.springer.de/link/service/series/0558/papers/1419/14190114.pdf •  • 2. "Making Tuple Spaces Safe for Heterogeneous Distributed Systems"• Naftaly Minsky, Yaron Minsky and Victoria Ungureanu• http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/340000/335748/p218-minsky.pdf?

key1=335748&key2=5819592101&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=1545331&CFTOKEN=87451905 

•  • 3."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.• http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/140000/138874/p265-lampson.pdf?

key1=138874&key2=1669592101&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=1545331&CFTOKEN=87451905