Agent Tcl: a flexible and secure mobile-agent system

Abstract

A mobile agent is an autonomous program that can migrate under its own control from machine to machine in a heterogeneous network. In other words, the program can suspend its execution at an arbitrary point, transport itself to another machine, and then resume execution from the point of suspension. Mobile agents have the potential to provide a single, general framework in which a wide range of distributed applications can be implemented efficiently and easily. Several challenges must be faced, however, most notably reducing migration overhead, protecting a machine from malicious agents (and an agent from malicious machines), and insulating the agent against network and machine failures. Agent Tcl is a mobile-agent system under development at Dartmouth College that has evolved from a Tcl-only system into a multiple-language system that currently supports Tcl, Java, and Scheme. In this thesis, we examine the motivation behind mobile agents, describe the base Agent Tcl system and its sec...