Security and Trust on Mobile Agent Platforms: A Survey

Mobile agent technologies are known for their capacity to develop and construct distributed, heterogeneous and interoperable systems. Despite the presence of several platforms for the development of mobile agent applications, security issues act as a main deterrent against such trends. Based on this, we conducted a comparative study of the most promising and existing mobile agent platforms, showing the diverse security features employed to address various threats. We investigate also the trust models used by the platforms. The established study focuses on the contributions to verify security criteria by the used security mechanisms in every studied platform. This study is important not only to allow practitioners pick the most suitable platforms to meet their security requirements, but also to allow researchers address the voids by ameliorating the concluded limits and proposing possible improvements of new versions of these platforms.