Case Studies in Security and Resource Management for Mobile Objects

Abstract

In a distributed system, objects may migrate from one node to another for a variety of reasons. The new location may provide a more suitable computational environment, it may offer cheaper resources, or it may have data needed by the agent to satisfy its goals. The ability of an object to exist in a resource space that is not entirely dedicated to its own computation raises security concerns for the object itself, and raises performance and security concerns for the host environment. Individual objects or groups of objects may exhibit undesirable resource consumptive behavior. These reasons make it important to study ways of controlling resources used by mobile objects.