A SECURE TIME-BOUND HIERARCHICAL KEY MANAGEMENT SCHEME BASED ON ECC FOR MOBILE AGENTS

Abstract

The core competencies of a mobile agent include free-roaming between different environment and autonomous environment detection and simultaneous adaptation to environment. Because of these competencies, the concept of mobile agent is widely used in many different fields, such as the Internet business, wireless communication and information security technologies, etc. In 1983, Akl and Taylor [1] suggested the concept of superkey to resolve the key management issues faced by the mobile agent. Later in 1998, Volker and Mehrdad [2] proposed a hierarchical mobile agent model for access control. Our proposed paper would be based upon the studies of superkey and a hierarchical mobile agent model with Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC). EGG, with its shorter key length and better efficiency at encryption/decryption, enhances the mobile agent model. All related works are presented in Section 2 of this paper. Following the explanation of the background of our proposal, we present our proposal, which aims to resolve the key management issue found in Volker and Mehrdad's model. Time-bound key management is considered to be a good solution, because it can make the key management in the existing mobile agent model more convenient by distributing keys that has a validity period.