Designing and Implementing a Secure, Portable, and Efficient Mobile Agent Kernel: The J-SEAL2 Approach

Dissertation / Doktorarbeit, die am 01.06.2001 erfolgreich an einer Technische Universität in �sterreich im Fachbereich Technische Naturwissenschaften und Informatik eingereicht wurde. Abstract: Even though the benefits of mobile agents have been highlighted in numerous research works, mobile agent applications are not in widespread use today. For the success of mobile agent applications, secure, portable, and efficient execution platforms for mobile agents are crucial. However, available mobile agent systems do not meet the high security requirements of commercial applications, are not portable, or cause high overhead. Currently, the majority of mobile agent platforms is based on Java. These systems simply rely on the security facilities of Java, although the Java security model is not suited to protect agents and service components from each other. Above all, Java is lacking a concept of strong protection domains that could be used to isolate agents. The J-SEAL2 mobile agent system extends the Java environment with a model of strong protection domains. The core of the system is a micro-kernel fulfilling the same functions as a traditional operating system kernel: Protection, communication, domain termination, and resource control. For portability reasons, J-SEAL2 is implemented in pure Java. J-SEAL2 provides an efficient communication model and offers good scalability and performance for large-scale applications. This thesis explains the key concepts of the J-SEAL2 micro-kernel and how they are implemented in Java. Table of Contents: 1|Overview|5 1.1|Introduction|5 1.2|Mobile Agent Systems in Java|8 1.3|J-SEAL2 System Structure|10 1.4|J-SEAL2 Security Properties|12 2.|Related Work|14 2.1|Java Operating Systems|14 2.1.1|JavaSeal|14 2.1.2|KaffeOS|16 2.1.3|Alta|16 2.1.4|J-Kernel|17 2.1.5|Luna|17 2.1.6|NOMADS|17 2.2|Resource Control in Java|18 2.2.1|Jres|18 2.2.2|Real-time Extensions for Java|18 2.2.3|Java Profilers|19 2.2.4|Econo...