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2002
Diploma Thesis
Titel
Realisierung einer sicheren Mobilen Agenten Plattform auf einem PDA
Abstract
Mobile agent technology may be of great use for portable, wireless devices. Mobile agents are independent software programs that can roam the Internet and perform tasks autonomously. This autonomy and flexibility allows them to be instructed by the user on a handheld device such as a personal digital assistant (PDA). After instruction, the agent may be sent to the Internet via a temporary dialup connection.This saves both resources and bandwidth on the PDA, since the agent can act on its own and may only return with somewhat valuable results. The scope of this diploma thesis was to port an existing platform for mobile agents so that it would run on a personal digital assistant (PDA). The mobile agent platform to be ported was SeMoA (Secure Mobile Agents), which is written entirely in Java. The idea was to preserve SeMoAs advantages, such as interoperability, extendibility and strong cryptography, even for handheld devices. Two PDAs from different generations were selected as target platforms: a Palm Vx and an iPaq 3660. There are various Java virtual machines available for both. Each has its own characteristics, advantages and disadvantages. In order to eliminate inappropriate virtual machines, a testing environment was developed to investigate essential features such as multithreading, thread groups, garbage collection, exception handling, object serialization and dynamic class loading. For the Palm Vx, no virtual machine could be found to support SeMoA's security architecture. For the Compaq iPaq, an appropriate virtual machine was found. It allows SeMoA to be run on a handheld device without any restrictions in its functionality. Therefore, SeMoA can use strong cryptography, dynamic proxy generation, Java security architecture, etc., as if it were running on a standard PC. For devices with StrongARM processors The result of this diploma thesis is that a full-featured version of SeMoA runs on the Compaq iPaq using the Familiar Linux distribution and Blackdown's J2SE 1.3.1. Furthermore, an application was developed that enables the distributed retrieval of MP3 files by mobile agents in order to demonstrate the performance of a portable mobile agent platform.
ThesisNote
Bingen, FH, Dipl.-Arb., 2002
Verlagsort
Darmstadt