A study of securing route structures for mobile agents dispatched in parallel

For mobile agents to be effective in practice, they have to be securely and efficiently deployed. In this paper, we first present and discuss five secure route structures for mobile agents dispatched in parallel. These schemes aim to protect the route information against malicious hosts and facilitate the efficient dispatching of a large number of agents, combining public-key encryption and signature schemes and exposing minimal route information to hosts. In terms of security, they are improved one by one. In the 5th structure, nested route and signature structures are adopted in order to detect attacks as early as possible. Meanwhile, the feedback based mechanism is adopted that can enforce the dispatch order to be strictly followed. Additionally, a robustness mechanism with substitute routes is provided for skipping temporarily unreachable hosts to activate descendant agents. Finally, we evaluated our models both analytically and empirically.