Authors:
Bartek Gedrojc
1
;
Jan C.A. van der Lubbe
1
and
Martin van Hensbergen
2
Affiliations:
1
Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
;
2
Fox-IT Forensic IT Experts, Netherlands
Keyword(s):
Mobile Agents, Secret Sharing, Threshold Signature, Hash Chaining, Untrustworthy Hosts, Private Computing.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Cryptographic Techniques and Key Management
;
Information and Systems Security
;
Mobile Code & Agent Security
Abstract:
Consider the problem of using mobile agents within an e-commerce setting where the goal is to purchase a desired item for a user. The problem is that the mobile agents visit a collection of hosts which are untrustworthy and therefore could tamper with the correct execution of the agents. Our approach to the e-commerce problem prevents the hosts to retrieve the price the user is willing to pay for a desired item, it prevents the hosts to retrieve the offers given by other hosts (confidentiality) and it ensures the integrity of the agents’ code, the query and itinerary. The key to our approach is the use of multiple agents for our goal; to purchase a desired item for a user. Analogous to a beehive, the user creates Drone agents that can collect data but which do not have the capability to process this data. Also, one Queen agent is deployed which uses the outputs of the Drone agents and makes a decision on that data. Simplified, we let the Drone agents do the work, while the Queen comp
utes the result.
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