Mobile agents and intellectual property protection

Technical enforcemment of intellectual property (IP) rights often conflicts with the ability to use the IP. This is especially true when the IP is data, which may eaisly be copied while it is being accessed. As electronic commerce of data becomes more widespread, traditional approaches will prove increasingly problematic. In this paper, we show that the mobile agent architecture is an ideal solution to this dilemma: by providing full access to the data but charging for the transmission of results back to the user-reslts-based billing-we resulve the access versus protection conflict. We define new requirements for agent frameworks to implement results-based billing: data-aware accounting and data-tight sandboxing, which, along with the common requirements such as authentication, authorisation, agen self-monitoring, and efficiency, provide the mechanisms by which database owners can effectively grant users access to their intellectual property.     

SAFE: secure agent roaming for e-commerce

The development of the Internet has made a powerful impact on the concept of commerce. E-commerce, a new way to conduct business, is gaining more and more popularity. Despite its rapid growth, there are limitations that hinder the expansion of e-commerce. The primary concern for most people when talking about online shopping is security. Due to the open nature of the Internet, personal financial details necessary for online shopping can be stolen if sufficient security mechanism is not put in place. How to provide the necessary assurance of security to consumers remains a question mark despite various past efforts. Another concern is the lack of intelligence. The Internet is an ocean of information depository. It is rich in content but lacks the necessary intelligent tools to help one locate the correct piece of information. Intelligent agent, a piece of software that can act on behalf of its owner intelligently, is designed to fill this gap. However, no matter how intelligent an agent is, if it remains on its owner's machine and does not have any roaming capability, its functionality is limited. With the roaming capability, more security concerns arise. In response to these concerns, SAFE, secure roaming agent for e-commerce, is designed to provide secure roaming capability to intelligent agents (Guan and Yang, 1999).     

Lightweight security for mobile commerce transactions

This paper describes a lightweight security mechanism for protecting electronic transactions conducted over the mobile platform. In a typical mobile computing environment, one or more of the transacting parties are based on some wireless handheld devices. Electronic transactions conducted over the mobile platform are gaining popularity and it is widely accepted that mobile computing is a natural extension of the wired Internet computing world. However, security over the mobile platform is more critical due to the open nature of wireless networks. Furthermore, security is more difficult to implement on the mobile platform because of the resource limitation of mobile handheld devices. Therefore, security mechanisms for protecting traditional computer communications need to be revisited so as to ensure that electronic transactions involving mobile devices can be secured and implemented in an effective manner. This research is part of our effort in designing security infrastructure for electronic commerce systems, which extend from the wired to the wireless Internet. A lightweight mechanism was designed to meet the security needs in face of the resource constraints. The proposed mechanism is proven to be practical in real deployment environment.     

Fault tolerance for home agents in mobile IP

In the conventional IP protocol, whenever a mobile device moves to a different network, it must change its IP address to communicate with other nodes in the Internet. Mobile IP protocol keeps mobile nodes online without changing their IP addresses while changing the attachment points. The packets destined to mobile nodes (MN) are relayed by their home agents (HA). However, once the only one HA fails, all MNs managed by the HA will not receive packets normally. In the paper, we propose a novel protocol with multiple mobile agents (MA) where only double mobility bindings are maintained in the whole system. When an HA is failed, its backup HA can take over it in a short time without fetching the bindings from other places. Besides, we also consider the load balancing between these HAs during HA takeover and recovery. Through the simulation and analyses, we found that our method has less registration overheads, better MN-scalability, less sensitivity on MN mobility, more fault-tolerance robustness, and less takeover time than others.     

Integrating mobile agents into the mobile middleware

Mobile agents are a new paradigm for distributed computing that is especially well suited for mobile computing over global wireless networks. This paper describes the approach taken in the ACTS On TheMove project to integrate a mobile agent system into the Mobile Application Support Environment (MASE), a middleware for mobile computing. In this project, an existing mobile agent system was adapted for the requirements of mobile computing. We present the changes that had to be made to the agent system to adapt it to the wireless communication. We also present some of the application areas where a mobile agent system is suitable for mobile communication. We describe an agent based pre-fetcher application where an agent operaes disconnected from the user on the fixed network and prepares web pages for the anticipated next connection of the user using the Quality-of-Service trading functions available in MASE.     

脆弱性数字水印在电子票据防篡改中的应用研究

随着Internet技术的不断成熟,电子商务的应用不断普及,其活动过程中各种电子票据的完整性保护倍受关注。在详细分析和研究了数字水印,特别是脆弱性水印算法、特征和应用领域的基础上,提出一种基于偶校验和最低有效位的脆弱性水印算法,该算法简单清晰,易于编程实现。实验结果表明该算法在不影响宿主图像视觉质量基础上,可精确地检测和定位对图像内容的局部恶意篡改,具有很强的敏感性、稳健性,同时该算法很容易推广到其他数字媒体。     

A framework for applying intelligent agents to support electronic trading

The purpose of this paper is to study how Intelligent Agents (IAs) can be used to facilitate electronic trading. An IA is a software program designed for performing a specific task based on its own knowledge and the message it received. Given the increased complexity of Internet services, many IAs are useful to make electronic markets more effective.In the paper, activities and structures of electronic markets are reviewed and discussed with respect to the coordination mechanism and primitive activities. This is followed by an analysis of IAs useful for electronic commerce (EC). A three-layer architecture for organizing IAs for EC is developed. Finally, application of the framework to support EC and related issues are presented. The findings are useful for implementing a more effective environment for EC.     

The shadow approach: An orphan detection protocol for mobile agents

Orphan detection in distributed systems is a well-researched field for which many solutions exist. These solutions exploit well defined parent-child relationships given in distributed systems. But they are not applicable in mobile agent systems, since no similar natural relationship between agents exist. Thus new protocols have to be developed. In this paper one such protocol for controlling mobile mobile agents and for orphan detection is presented. The shadow approach presented in this paper uses the idea of a placeholder (shadow) which is assigned by the agent system to each new agent. This defines an artificial relationship between agents and shadow. The shadow records the location of all dependent agents. Removing the root shadow implies that all dependent agents are declared orphan and are eventually be terminated. We introduce agent proxies that create a path from shadow to every agent. In an extension of the basic protocol we additionally allow the shadow to be mobile.The shadow approach can be used for termination of groups of agents even if the exact location of each single agent is not known.     

Applying virtual reality for trust-building e-commerce environments

The application of virtual reality in e-commerce has enormous potential for transforming online shopping into a real-world equivalent. However, the growing research interest focuses on virtual reality technology adoption for the development of e-commerce environments without addressing social and behavioral facets of online shopping such as trust. At the same time, trust is a critical success factor for e-commerce and remains an open issue as to how it can be accomplished within an online store. This paper shows that the use of virtual reality for online shopping environments offers an advanced customer experience compared to conventional web stores and enables the formation of customer trust. The paper presents a prototype virtual shopping mall environment, designed on principles derived by an empirically tested model for building trust in e-commerce. The environment is evaluated with an empirical study providing evidence and explaining that a virtual reality shopping environment would be preferred by customers over a conventional web store and would facilitate the assessment of the e-vendor’s trustworthiness.     

基于移动Agent的电子商务交易平台研究

针对传统电子商务平台存在的问题,提出了一个以移动Agent为中介服务的电子商务交易平台,阐述了该平台各组成部分的功能.实验采用价格优先和数量优先的购买策略,分析了该平台中移动Agent的性能,实验仿真结果表明移动Agent的引入提高了平台处理客户信息的速度,缩短了达成交易的时间并降低了网络的通信量.     

Efficient threshold proxy signature protocol for mobile agents

Mobile agents can migrate across different execution environments through the network. One important task of a mobile agent is to act as a proxy signer to sign a digital signature on behalf of the agent owner. As the agent and the remote hosts are not trustworthy, or are probably malicious, there are great challenges for the task. In this paper, we propose an efficient, secure (t,n) threshold proxy signature scheme based on the RSA cryptosystem. The proposed scheme shares the proxy signing key with a simple Lagrange formula. However, it does not reveal any secret information. Owing to its simple algorithm and few parameter requirements, the proposed scheme requires few calculations and few transactions. The proxy signature generation stage and the proxy signature combining stage are completely non-interactive. Furthermore, the size of the partial proxy signing key and that of the partial proxy signature are constant and independent of the number of proxy signers.     

Using cooperative mobile agents to monitor distributed and dynamic environments

Monitoring the changes in data values obtained from the environment (e.g., locations of moving objects) is a primary concern in many fields, as for example in the pervasive computing environment. The monitoring task is challenging from a double perspective. First and foremost, the environment can be highly dynamic in terms of the rate of data changes. Second, the monitored data are often not available from a single computer/device but are distributed; moreover, the set of data providers can change along the course of time. Therefore, obtaining a global snapshot of the environment and keeping it up-to-date is not easy, especially if the conditions (e.g., network delays) change.In this article, a decentralized, loose, and fault-tolerant monitoring approach based on the use of mobile agents is described. Mobile agents allow easy tracking of the involved computers, carrying the monitoring tasks to wherever they are needed. A deadline-based mechanism is used to coordinate the cooperative agents, which strive to perform their continuous tasks in time while considering data as recent as possible, constantly adapting themselves to new environmental conditions (changing communication and processing delays). This approach has been successfully used in a real environment and experiments were carried out to prove its feasibility and benefits.     

Searching for a black hole in arbitrary networks: optimal mobile agents protocols

Consider a networked environment, supporting mobile agents, where there is a black hole: a harmful host that disposes of visiting agents upon their arrival, leaving no observable trace of such a destruction. The black hole search problem is the one of assembling a team of asynchronous mobile agents, executing the same protocol and communicating by means of whiteboards, to successfully identify the location of the black hole; we are concerned with solutions that are generic (i.e., topology-independent). We establish tight bounds on the size of the team (i.e., the number of agents), and the cost (i.e., the number of moves) of a size-optimal solution protocol. These bounds depend on the a priori knowledge the agents have about the network, and on the consistency of the local labelings. In particular, we prove that: with topological ignorance Δ+1 agents are needed and suffice, and the cost is Θ(n ²), where Δ is the maximal degree of a node and n is the number of nodes in the network; with topological ignorance but in presence of sense of direction only two agents suffice and the cost is Θ(n ²); and with complete topological knowledge only two agents suffice and the cost is Θ(n log n). All the upper-bound proofs are constructive.A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the 21st ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing [21].     

Interface agents: caveat mercator in electronic commerce

Electronic commerce has opened new opportunities for buyers and sellers. Consumers can do things in an on-line environment that are simply not possible in face-to-face transactions. In this paper, we push this observation by examining and using a new type of software agent to convert merchant interfaces into middleware thus enabling one to assess and optimize their interactions with all the computing support available in today's Decision Support System (DSS) environments.     

Designing appliances for mobile commerce and retailtainment

In the emerging world of the new consumer and the `anytime, anywhere' mobile commerce, appliances are located at the collision point of the retailer and consumer agendas. The consequence of this is twofold: on the one hand appliances that were previously considered plain and utilitarian become entertainment devices and on the other, for the effective design of consumer appliances it becomes paramount to employ multidisciplinary expertise. In this paper, we discuss consumer perceptions of a retailtainment commerce system developed in collaboration between interactivity designers, information systems engineers, hardware and application developers, marketing strategists, product development teams, social scientists and retail professionals. We discuss the approached employed for the design of the consumer experience and its implications for appliance design.     

AgentTeamwork: Coordinating grid-computing jobs with mobile agents

AgentTeamwork is a grid-computing middleware system that dispatches a collection of mobile agents to coordinate a user job over remote computing nodes in a decentralized manner. Its utmost focus is to maintain high availability and dynamic balancing of distributed computing resources to a parallel-computing job. For this purpose, a mobile agent is assigned to each process engaged in the same job, monitors its execution at a different machine, takes its periodical execution snapshot, moves it to a lighter-loaded machine, and resumes it from the latest snapshot upon an accidental crash. The system also restores broken inter-process communication involved in the same job using its error-recoverable socket and mpiJava libraries in collaboration among mobile agents. We have implemented the first version of our middleware including a mobile agent execution platform, error-recoverable socket and mpiJava API libraries, a job wrapper program, and several types of mobile agents such as commander, resource, sentinel, and bookkeeper agents, each orchestrating, allocating resources to, monitoring and maintaining snapshots of a user process respectively. This paper presents AgentTeamwork’s execution model, its implementation techniques, and our performance evaluation using the Java Grande benchmark test programs. Munehiro Fukuda received a B.S. from the College of Information Sciences and an M.S. from the Master’s Program in Science and Enginnering at the University of Tsukuba in 1986 and 1988. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science at the University of California at Irvine in 1995 and 1997, respectively. He worked at IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory from 1988 to 1993 and taught at the University of Tsukuba from 1998 to 2001. Since 2001, he has been an assistant professor at Computing & Software Systems, the University of Washington, Bothell. His research interests include mobile agents, multi-threading, cluster computing, grid computing and distributed simulations. Koichi Kashiwagi received a Bachelor of Science degree from the Faculty of Science, Ehime University in 2000 and a Master of Engineering degree from the Department of Compter Science, Ehime University in 2002. In 2004 he became a research assistant in Department of Compter Science, Ehime University. His research interests include distributed computing, job scheduling, and grid computing. Shin-ya Kobayashi received the B.E. degree, M.E. degree, and Dr.E. degree in Communication Engineering from Osaka University in 1985, 1988, and 1991 respectively. From 1991 to 1999, he was on the faculty of Engineering at Kanazawa University, Japan. From 1999 to 2004, He was an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Ehime University. He is a Professor at Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Ehime University. His research interests include distributed processing, and parallel processing. He is a member of the Information Processing Society of Japan, the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan, IEEE, and ACM.     

Searching for a black hole in interconnected networks using mobile agents and tokens

We study the impact of the topological structure on the complexity of the Black hole search (Bhs) problem using mobile agents that communicate via tokens. First, we show that the token model can support the same cost as in the whiteboard model, despite the fact that communication between mobile agents is considerably more restricted (and complex) in a token model than in a whiteboard one. More precisely, in this paper, we focus on three specific topologies, namely: an asynchronous (i) hypercube, (ii) torus and (iii) complete network. With knowledge of which of these topologies is being used, we present token-based solutions for Bhs   where the number of moves executed by a team of two co-located anonymous agents can be reduced to Θ(n)$\Theta \left(n\right)$. These proposed solutions do not require the availability of a map and do not assume FIFO on either nodes or links.     

Protecting mobile agents from external replay attacks

This paper presents a protocol for the protection of mobile agents against external replay attacks. This kind of attacks are performed by malicious platforms when dispatching an agent multiple times to a remote host, thus making it reexecute part of its itinerary. Current proposals aiming to address this problem are based on storing agent identifiers, or trip markers, inside agent platforms, so that future reexecutions can be detected and prevented. The problem of these solutions is that they do not allow the agent to perform legal migrations to the same platform several times. The aim of this paper is to address these issues by presenting a novel solution based on authorisation entities, which allow the agent to be reexecuted on the same platform a number of times determined at runtime. The proposed protocol is secure under the assumption that authorisation entities are trusted.     

一种数据完整性策略的形式化描述

数据完整性是信息系统的安全目标之一,该文描述了一个时间相关的数据库管理系统的完整性策略模型。该模型将数据的完整性与时间联系起来,定义数据完整性的演化规则,解决了低可靠性的主体需要更新高完整性级别数据的问题。     

基于移动代理的电子商务安全模型研究

移动代理是近几年来兴起的一项重要技术,它将在未来电子商务系统中发挥重要的作用。因此,其安全问题也成为社会关注的一个焦点。文章将对这些安全问题作详细的讨论,并给出相应的解决方案。