Protecting mobile-agent data collection against blocking attacks

Full-scale adoption of mobile agent technology in untrustworthy network environment, such as Internet, has been delayed due to several security complexities. The protection of mobile agents against the attacks of malicious hosts is considered a very challenging security problem. It has inspired lot of research interest, but very few measures exist to counter blocking attack where a host with malicious intentions refuses to transmit a mobile agent to the next host. It becomes an important requirement for the agent owner to rescue the data collected by the agent under custody and redeem a loss. In this paper, we present two schemes that rescue the offering results from a malicious host's blocking attack, and make a comparison of their performance from several aspects. Our approach has two new features that previous protocols lack. It allows the proper handling of time-sensitive offers and supports the gradual decision-making execution.