How a Secure and Open Mobile Agent Framework Suits Electronic Commerce Applications.pdf

How a Secure and Open Mobile Agent Framework Suits Electronic Commerce Applications Paolo Bellavista, Antonio Corradi, Rebecca Montanari Dip. di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica Università di Bologna Viale Risorgimento 2, 40136 Bologna, Italy {pbellavista, acorradi, rmontanari} @deis.unibo.it Cesare Stefanelli Dipartimento di Ingegneria Università di Ferrara Via Saragat 1, 44100 Ferrara, Italy cstefanelli@ing.unife.it Abstract The Mobile Agent (MA) paradigm seems able to support effectively distributed applications in open and hetero- geneous environments, and application areas such as e- commerce appear to be of particular interest. However, MA technology has to answer to the requirements of security and interoperability to achieve wide deployment, especially in e-commerce applications. The paper focuses on security and interoperability, and describes a Secure and Open Mobile Agent (SOMA) programming envi- ronment where both requirements are main design objec- tives. On the one hand, SOMA is based on a thorough security model and provides a wide range of mechanisms and tools to build and enforce flexible security policies. On the other hand, the SOMA framework permits to interoperate with different application components de- signed with different programming styles. SOMA grants interoperability by closely considering compliance with the OMG CORBA and MASIF standards. In par- ticular, the paper presents a SOMA-based e-marketplace that stresses to the limit the security and interoperability issues and that has served as a testbed for the validation of SOMA security and interoperability support. 1. Introduction Global distributed systems such as the Internet and the Web have proposed a new framework for application development and have motivated the interest in new and flexible programming paradigms based on dynamically mobile entities. Remote Evaluation, Code On Demand and Mobile Agents (MA) [1] [2] [3] propose the migra-