Security Protections for Mobile Agents

Stephen Tate, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Computer Science and

Director of the Center for Information and Computer Security at the University of North Texas

Thursday, August 26, 2004, 2:00-3:00pm

110 Jerry Junkins Building

Abstract

The emerging paradigm of mobile agents has received a lot of attention lately, with code mobility being a promising direction for future research.  While the benefits of mobile code, including dynamic adaptation, autonomous and asynchronous execution, robustness and fault-tolerance, are great, the security concerns are also acute. Protecting hosts from malicious agents is well-understood, and the "sandbox" approach taken by Java, AgentTCL, and other agent systems provides an effective solution.  On the other hand, protecting agents from malicious hosts is a much harder issue, since hosts have complete control over the execution environment of the agent.

This talk presents an overview of the problem of protecting agents from malicious hosts, and presents several of our recent results in this area.  In particular, we consider both the problem of protecting the integrity of data carried by the agent, as well as protecting the confidentiality of data while still allowing computations with that data.  Our techniques for allowing computation with confidential data are distinguished from earlier approaches in that they are software-only (requiring no special hardware to enforce security), protect both originator data and data provided by the remote host, and do not require a "trusted third party" in the network.  We also define a clear model of agent security in the robust "universally composable“ framework, and show how our protocol can be implemented to achieve provable security in this model (at the cost of some efficiency loss from a more straightforward implementation).

Biography

Stephen Tate is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Information and Computer Security at the University of North Texas, which has been designated a "National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education" by the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.

Prof. Tate's current research is in the area of cryptography and computer security, and he has previously performed and published research in several areas, including circuit complexity and parallel algorithms, robotics, particle simulation algorithms, on-line algorithms, and data compression.

Prof. Tate received his B.E. from Vanderbilt University in 1986, and his Ph.D. from Duke University in 1991.  After a two-year postdoc appointment supported by NASA, he joined the faculty at the University of North Texas in 1993.

 

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