Abstracts Computer Science

Practical implementation for authentication of electronic transaction using mobile agents

by Song Hu

Mobile agents are often described as a promising technology moving towards the vision of a widely distributed scalable electronic market. The deployment of electronic services, especially in the area of electronic commerce, raises essential questions closely related to security issues. This thesis first describes a common authentication scenario in electronic commerce area. To solve this scenario, we design a mobile agent model which involves two authentication levels: high-level customer authentication and low-level mobile agent authentication. As implementation of high level customer authentication, we select an opened CORBA based Java mobile agent system – Grasshopper. To achieve mobile agent level authentication, we suggest two cutting-edge security techniques: Java fine-grained access control from JDK 1.2 and the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol from Netscape. This project has been done within the group on "Advanced Studies on Mobile Environments" (ASME) as a part of the Consortium MIAMI (Mobile Intelligent Agents for Managing the Information Infrastructure).