Mobile agent technology applied into EC is facing many problems. Security should be the first concern. But in large scale multi-agent systems, the most challenging problems encountered are locating and communicating of these autoprocessing agents. Some approaches have used several different methods to solve these problems. But unfortunately, they were not satisfied either for their complexity, poor performance or their lack of applicability. In our approach, we propose a secure group communication solution toward the security, locating and communication problems. We differentiated the ”Agent-Based” Multicast concept from the traditional ”Host-Based” Multicast. We then described the requirements for providing secure group services and introduce the key distribution method. A cryptographic method is complemented for further protect the agents. Finally, we analyzed the security and performance issues and conclude our solution.
['Tieyan Li', 'Kwok-Yan Lam']
A secure group solution for multi-agent ec system