Security and trust management in mobile agents: a new perspective

This paper presents a new perspective for mobile agent security - trust enhanced security and develops MobileTrust - a novel trust management architecture to support the trust enhanced security solutions for mobile agents. Based on this new perspective we go beyond traditional security mechanism based architectural design by incorporating a trust model into the underlying security architecture. Such an approach enables explicit management of security related trust relationships and it integrates trust into security decision making process to achieve trust enhanced security, which is impossible with the traditional security models. The proposed architecture provides several desirable emergent properties: increased level of security for mobile agent and host, improved flexibility, and scalability of the underlying security system, which are only made possible by this new trust management based approach.