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Protecting the computation results of free-roaming agents

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Abstract

When mobile agents do comparison shopping for their owners, they are subject to attacks of malicious hosts executing the agents. We present a family of protocols that protect the computation results established by free-roaming mobile agents. Our protocols enable the owner of the agent to detect upon its return whether a visited host has maliciously altered the state of the agent, thus providing forward integrity and truncation resilience. In an environment without public-key infrastructure, the protocols are based only on a secret hash chain. With a public-key infrastructure, the protocols also guarantee non-repudiability.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Zurich Research Laboratory, IBM Research Division, Saumerstrasse 4, Rueschlikon, CH-8803, Zurich, Switzerland

    G. Karjoth, N. Asokan & C. Gülcü

Authors
  1. G. Karjoth
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  2. N. Asokan
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  3. C. Gülcü
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Correspondence to G. Karjoth.

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Karjoth, G., Asokan, N. & Gülcü, C. Protecting the computation results of free-roaming agents. Personal Technologies 2, 92–99 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01324939

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01324939

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