A mobile agent can choose when and to where it will migrate and may also interrupt its own execution and continue on other hosts over a network. This course will begin with the architecture of mobile agent systems. The agent manager dispatches the agent and collects the results from the agents. Agent communicator defines the communication protocols and tools for agents to exchange messages. Finally, the agent server hosts the execution of the mobile agent and provides a transportation mechanism to transfer agent from one host to another host.
Security is a critical issue in mobile agent system.
We will explain why the security is important and why a perfect solution is difficult. A digital watermark agent is computer software that can travel from web site to web site, checking for a specified set of watermarks in millions of images. A digital watermark can be secretly embedded into a document, and the watermark is robust and secure, i.e., a watermark can only be retrieved by an owner's secret key and a watermark can survive many common malicious attacks. Once the watermark is detected, the agent traces the illegal documents and reports the violation to the dispatcher of the original agent. This course will also help the audience understand the importance and great potential in a variety of application areas.