Empowering mobile software agents

Recent work has shown that several cryptographic protocols for the protection of free-roaming mobile agents are vulnerable by means of protocol interleaving attacks. This paper presents equivalent protocols meant to be robust against this type of attack. Moreover, it describes the required processes and data structures at a level of detail that can be translated to an implementation in a straightforward way. Our aim is to demonstrate how cryptographic processing can be implemented transparently for agent programmers, thereby reducing the risks of human error in (secure) mobile agent programming.