Obfuscation Techniques for Mobile Agent Code Confidentiality
Sandhya Armoogum, Asvin Caully
Journal of E-Technology, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2010.
DOI: 
Link: http://www.dline.info/jet/fulltext/v1n2/4.pdf
Abstract:
Mobile code, typically mobile agent applications, promises many advantages and is suitable to many different types of applications. However, the main hindrance to the advancement of mobile agent technology is security issues such as mobile agent code confidentiality. Existing security mechanisms for mobile agent technology basically allow for protection against code and data integrity changes by using for instance digitally signed mobile agents. However, no viable mechanism for protecting access to the code of the agent from malicious hosts on which the agent arrives. Mobile cryptography which is proposed as the only solution to code confidentiality is too expensive to implement. In this paper, an implementation of code obfuscation has been proposed to provide code confidentiality. Code obfuscation is currently being used in many other fields e.g. software piracy prevention. Thus it is believed that while some more foolproof techniques are devised for code protection against unauthorized access, obfuscation techniques can provide some security. We thus investigate the use of three different obfuscation techniques on java mobile agent code for security.