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 On the Problem of Trust in Mobile Agent Systems Uwe G. Wilhelm and Sebastian Staamann Levente Buttyán Lab oratoire de Systèmes dExploitation Lab oratoire de Telecommunications Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland e-mail: {Uwe.Wilhelm, Sebastian.Staamann, Levente.Buttyan}@epfl.ch Abstract has b een identied as a ma jor problem that is cur- rently b eing tackled in b oth systems (Signed Java Systems that support mobile agents are increasingly Archives [11] in Java and Authentico de [17] in Ac- being used on the glob al Internet. Security concerns tiveX). The signature is intended to convey trust in dealing with the pr otection of the execution environ- the co de. However, the only thing that it can con- ment from malicious agents are extensively being tack- vey is the trust in the identity of the signer of the led. We concentrate on the reverse pr oblem, namely co de and the integrity of the received co de (i.e., the how a mobile agent can be protected from malicious be- assurance that the co de was not tamp ered with af- haviour of the execution environment, which is largely ter the signature has b een applied). If the user also ignored. trusts the signer, which is an entirely dierent ques- We wil l identify the pr oblem of trust as the ma- tion, he can place some condence in the co de (e.g., if jor issue in this context and de