Enabling Mobile Agents Interoperability Through FIPA Standards (original) (raw)

JADE - A FIPA-compliant agent framework

1999

JADE is a software framework to develop agent applications in compliance with the FIPA specifications for interoperable intelligent multi-agent systems. The goal is to simplify development while ensuring standard compliance through a comprehensive set of system services and agents. JADE can then be considered an agent middle-ware that implements an Agent Platform and a development framework. It deals with all those aspects that are not peculiar of the agent internals and that are independent of the applications, such as message transport, encoding and parsing, or agent life-cycle. This paper presents the JADE software describing its intended uses, as well as being a walkthrough of JADE internal architecture. The main architectural issues are discussed, and the major design decisions are outlined.

Protection and interoperability for mobile agents: a secure and open programming environment

IEICE Transactions on …, 2000

The Mobile Agent technology helps in the development of applications in open, distributed and heterogeneous environments such as the Internet and the Web, but it has to answer to the requirements of security and interoperability to achieve wide acceptance. The paper focuses on security and interoperability, and describes a Secure and Open Mobile Agent (SOMA) programming environment where both requirements are main design objectives. On the one hand, SOMA is based on a thorough security model and provides a wide range of mechanisms and tools to build and enforce flexible security policies. On the other hand, the SOMA framework permits to interoperate with different application components designed with different programming styles. SOMA grants interoperability by closely considering compliance with the OMG CORBA and MASIF standards. SOMA has already shown the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach for the development of flexible and adaptive applications in several areas, particularly in network and systems management. key words: ÑÓ Ð ÒØ×¸× ÙÖ Øݸ ÒØ ÖÓÔ Ö Ð Øݸ ÇÊ Ò ØÛÓÖ Ò ×Ý×Ø Ñ× Ñ Ò Ñ ÒØ

FIPA-based Interoperable Agent Mobility Proposal

arXiv (Cornell University), 2007

This paper presents a proposal for a flexible agent mobility architecture based on IEEE-FIPA standards and intended to be one of them. This proposal is a first step towards interoperable mobility mechanisms, which are needed for future agent migration between different kinds of platforms. Our proposal is presented as a flexible and robust architecture that has been successfully implemented in the JADE and AgentScape platforms. It is based on an open set of protocols, allowing new protocols and future improvements to be accommodated in the architecture. With this proposal we demonstrate that a standard architecture for agent mobility capable of supporting several agent platforms can be defined and implemented.

Middleware services for interoperability in open mobile agent systems

2001

Despite the design and implementation of several mobile agent (MA) platforms, widely diffused services based on the MA programming paradigm are still lacking. Apart from the security challenges imposed by the MA technology, the paper claims that interoperability between MAs, legacy systems and heterogeneous MA platforms is a major obstacle to the MA diffusion. The paper discusses solutions to permit the interworking between MA platforms and other systems, even non-MA-based, via compliance with either accepted or emerging interoperability standards. In particular, it focuses on compliance with CORBA, the accepted standard for object-oriented components, but also with MASIF and FIPA, respectively, the OMG speci®cation for the support of agent mobility and management, and the framework for standard agent platforms and communication languages. The discussed solutions have guided the design and implementation of the middleware interoperability service in the secure and open mobile agents (SOMA) programming framework. The SOMA interoperability service is structured in a layered and modular way: its components can be dynamically distributed and installed only where and when needed. The paper also presents an application scenario in the area of network, systems and service management, where the interoperability components permit the interworking of SOMA agents, SNMP-compliant elements, legacy resources, and non-SOMA MA platforms. q

A common base for building secure mobile agent middleware systems

2007

The Agent Operating System (AOS) provides the basic functionality needed for secure and reliable mobile agent platforms: support for secure communication, secure agent storage and migration, and minimal primitives for agent life-cycle management. Designed as a layer between local operating systems and higher level agent platform middleware, it supports interoperability between agent platforms and between different implementations of AOS itself. AOS has been tested on interoperability, both with regard to different higher-layer middleware platforms and interoperability between two implementations of AOS in C++ and Java.

A Secure Mobile Agents Platform

Journal of Communications, 2008

Mobile Agents is a new paradigm for distributed computing where security is very essential to the acceptance of this paradigm in a large scale distributed environment. In this paper, we propose protection mechanisms for mobile agents. In these mechanisms, the authentication of mobile agents and the access control to the system resources are controlled by the mobile-agents platform. Each agent defines its own access control policy with regard to other agents using an Interface Definition Language (IDL), thus enforcing modularity and easing programming task. An evaluation of these mechanisms has been conducted. The measurements give the overhead involved by the proposed protection mechanisms to the performance of mobile agents. An important advantage of our protection mechanisms are transparency to agents and the portability of nonsecure applications onto a secure environment. A mobile agent system and the protection mechanisms have been implemented. Our experiments have shown the feasibility and the advantages of our mechanisms.

An Architectural Model for a Mobile Agents System Interoperability

New Technologies, Mobility and Security

An important goal in mobile agent technology is interoperability between various agent systems. A way of achieving this goal would be to envisage a standard to be imposed on these various "agents systems" in order to allow the inter-working of various architectures of mobile agents. During the past years, different scientific communities proposed to different standardization actions, such as the Foundation for Physical Intelligent Agents (FIPA) and the Object Management Group's MASIF (Mobile Agent System Interoperability Facilities). Although, they finally share some major targets, the OMG and FIPA current results show their distinct origins, particularly for interoperability between or within distributed systems. In this paper, we first analyze the similarities and differences, advantages and disadvantages of the Object Management Group (OMG) mobile agent and the Foundations for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) intelligent agent approaches. Based on this analysis, we try to integrate these two standards to propose an architectural model for mobile agents system interoperability.

Security Framework for Mobile Agents-Based Applications

Mobile Computing Techniques in …, 2012

Mobile agents have been proposed for key applications such as forensics analysis, intrusion detection, e-commerce, and resource management. Yet, they are vulnerable to various security threats by malicious hosts or intruders. Conversely, genuine platforms may run malicious agents. It is essential to establish a truly secure framework for mobile agents to gain trust of clients in the system. Failure to accomplish a trustworthy secured framework for Mobile Agent System (MAS) will limit their deployment into the key applications. This chapter presents a comprehensive taxonomy of various security threats to Mobile Agent System and the existing implemented security mechanisms. Different mechanisms are discussed, and the related security deficiencies are highlighted. The various security properties of the agent and the agent platform are described. The chapter also introduces the properties, advantages, and roles of agents in various applications. It describes the infrastructure of the system and discusses several mobile agent frameworks and the accomplished security level.

Toward interoperability of mobile-agent systems

2002

Growing recognition of the benefits of mobile agents in distributed systems, such as military C4ISR, has led to a proliferation of mobile agent systems. However, incompatibilities between proprietary systems prevent the greater potential benefits of ubiquitous mobile agent computing. In particular, agents cannot migrate to a host that runs a different mobile-agent system. Prior approaches to interoperability have tried to force agents to use a common API and so far none have succeeded.