Extending Agent-based Mobile Petri Nets with Access Control

Agent-based Mobile Petri Nets are a powerful variant of classical Petri Nets which integrate mobile agent technology. A mobile agent migrates among heterogeneous platforms by acquiring their services to perform its goal. Agent based Mobile Petri Nets effectively model mobility, concurrency and distributed nature of a mobile agent. However, security aspects related to mobile agent's mobility are still lacking. This paper has enriched Agent-based Mobile Petri Nets with access control mechanisms. Two access control mechanisms namely; static and dynamic, have been integrated in Agent-based Mobile Petri Nets. For static access control, each mobile agent net is equipped with an access control list which defines a fixed list and access rights for visiting mobile agents. For dynamic access control, access control matrix has been associated with each mobile agent net for granting the visiting mobile agents with respective privileges. The assigned privileges are not fixed and they change with state of agent net. Finally the proposed access control mechanisms are verified with a case study.