Maximizing utility of mobile agent based e-commerce applications with trust enhanced security

Utility has become an important consideration for information security. In this paper, we show that decisions by security mechanisms, such as the authorization decisions in a mobile agent based e-commerce system, have a direct impact on the utility of the underlying system. While benevolent behaviors contribute to the utility, malicious behaviors are the causes for lost of utility. Furthermore we show that a trust enhanced security framework can be deployed to maximize the utility of the mobile agent based e-commerce systems. This is due to one of the unique features of trust enhanced security solutions - the ability to use trust evaluation to "weed out" malicious entities. This paper presents a qualitative solution for utility maximization, and paves the way for future development of quantitative solutions. Finally, we study the properties of the proposed framework through simulation and present the results of the simulated studies which confirm our intuitions about utility maximization.