Patent ID: 7778931

Claim:
A method for securing processing of an order by a mobile agent from a first server (S o ) within a network system with a plurality of servers (S o , S i , . . . S n ), wherein the mobile agent passes through at least two of the servers, and wherein each of the plurality of servers has a corresponding pair of a public key (KS o , . . . ,KS i , . . . , KS n ) and a private key (PKS o , . . . ,PKS i , . . . , PKS n ), and wherein any one of the at least two servers the mobile agent is currently stored on is called herein the i'th server, the method comprising: assigning a unique number (r 0 ) to the mobile agent, using the first server (S o ), encrypting the unique number (r 0 ) with the private key (PKS o ) of the first server (S o ), at the first server, thus forming an agent specific initialisation number (C o ) as a first checksum (C o ) for a sequence of checksums (C o , . . . ,C i , . . . ,C n ) to be individually computed by the at least two servers of the plurality of servers (S o , S 1 , . . . , S n ), sending the mobile agent together with its initialisation number (C o ) through the at least two servers of the plurality of servers (S o , S 1 , . . . , S n ), thereby processing the order, encrypting, at the i'th server, the initialisation number (C o ) together with data (X i ) collected by the agent when passing the i'th server, using the i'th server's private key (PKS i ), computing, at the i'th server, a new server specific checksum (C i ) of the sequence of checksums (C o , . . . ,C i , . . . ,C n ), using the public key (KS o ) of the first server (S o ) and the checksum (C i−1 ) computed by the server (S i−1 ) from which the i'th server receives the mobile agent, and sending the mobile agent further to the next server (S i+1 ) of the at least two servers of the plurality of servers (S o , S 1 , . . . ,S n ).