Desenvolupament d'aplicacions decisives i segures sobre una plataformadesenvolupament d'aplicacions decisives i segures sobre una plataforma lleugera d'agents mòbils

This project answers the clear need for secure killer applications of mobile agents in order to justify mobile agent technology and to drive it as an indispensable and valid development instrument. A preliminary development of a lightweight platform for mobile agent execution is foreseen in the framework of this project. A set of tools for application development is also planed. This platform will include basic mechanisms providing security and fault tolerance. A number of agent architectures will complete the platform, providing structural elements for agent construction as well as mechanisms for protecting data, code and itineraries. These agent architectures, together with the platform, will stand for a significant change on present conception of mobile agent applications. New logical instruments for resource access control are going to be designed to complete the mobile agent execution platform. Although there exists some approaches to face this problem, it is very important to carefully outline their adaptation in mobile agent environments and to design new mechanisms to solve specific problems. Virtual communities of mobile agents in applications make it obvious to accept the relevance of social mechanisms in this type of systems. Applicability of trust and other social instruments will be analysed in three specific areas: the search of alternatives to traditional security schemes, application usage of agent relationships, and ethic issues arising from the consideration of agents as a representative of its programmers or owners. Finally, Sea-of -Data scenarios will be analysed for the identificaction of potential applications in which mobile agents are the only feasible solution. Later, there applications will be implemented using the previously developed platform. Some of the foreseen scenarios to study are: distributed image processing, intrusion detection, medical data, and some GRID management aspects