4UNIT

Mobile
Agent Computing
Part-l .. (135J - 155J)

Mobile Agent Computing

Security and Fault Tolerance
A. Concept Outline :Part-1. 135J
B.Long and Medium Answer Type Questions. 135J

Part-2.. (155J- 164J)

Transaction Processing in Mobile Computing Environment

A. Concept Outline : Part-2. 155J
B. Long and Medium Answer Type Questions. 155J

134 (IT-8) J
 135 (IT-8) J
Mobile Computing

PART- 1

Mobile Agent Computing, Security and Fcult Tolerance.

CONCEPT OUTLINE : PART- 1
Amobile agent is a process that can transport its state from one
environment to another, with its data intact.
Properties of mobile agents are :
Adaptive learning
b. Autonomy
C. Mobility
Various mobile agent system are:
a Agent TCL
b. Mobility
Various types of security attacks are :
Interception
b Modification
C. Virus and worms
d Denial of service
e Intrusion

Questions-Answers

Long Answer Type and Medium Answer Type Questicons

Que 4.1. What do you mean by mobile agent ?

Answer
Mobile agent :
1 An agent is a person whose job is to0 act for, or manage the affairs of
other people.
2 In context of computers, software agents refer to the programs that
perform certain tasks on behalf of the user.
3 Software agents have some propertiee, which distinguish them from
other programs, such as autonomy, responsiveness, communicative
ability, adaptability.
4 Amobile agent is a type of software agent, with the feature of autonomy,
social ability, learning and most importantly mobility.
 136 (IT-8) J Mobile Agent Computing
5 In computer science, a mobile agent is a composition of computer software
and data which is able to move from one computer t0 another
autonomously and continue its execution on the destination computer.
6.
More specifically, amobile agent is aprocess that can transport its state
from one environment to another, with its data intact, and be capable of
performing appropriately in the new environment.
7. Mobile agents decide when and where to move.
8 Movement is often evolved from RPC methods.
9 When a mobile agent decides to move, it saves its own state, transport
this saved state to the new host and resumes execution from the saved
state.
10. Software agents can be classified as static agents and mobile agents.
11. Static agents achieve the goal by executing on a single machine.
12. On the other hand, mobile agents migrate from one computer to another
in the network and execute on several machines.

13. Mobility increases the functionality of the mobile agent and allows the
mobile agent to perform tasks beyond the scope of static agents.
Characteristics of mobile agent :
Following are the characteristics of mobile agent:
1. Situatedness: It means that an agent receives sensory input from its
environment and it can perform actions which change the environment
in some way.
2 Autonomy :It means that an agent is able to act without the direct
intervention of humans (or other agents) and it has control over its own
actions and internal states.
3. Flexibility : It can be defined to include the following properties :
a.
Responsive :Itrefers to an agent abilitytoperceive its environment
and respond in a timely fashion tochanges that occur in it.
b. Proactive : Agents are able to exhibit opportunistic, goal-driven
behaviour and take the initiative where appropriate.
C. Social: Agent[ should be able to interact, when appropriate, with
other agents and human in order to solve their own problems and
to help others with their activities.
4. Rationality : The assumption that an agent will not act in a manner
that prevents it from achieving its goals.
5. Mobility: The ability for an agent to move across networks and between
different hosts to fulfill its goal.
Que 4.2. State the advantages and disadvantages of mobile
agents.
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Mobile Computing

Answer
Advantages of mobile agents :
They facilitate high quality, high performance, economical mobile
1.
applications.
2 Bandwidth :
communications protocols that
Distributed systems often rely on
a given task.
involve multiple interactions to accomplish
measures are enabled.
b. This is especially true when security
traffic.
C. The result is a lot of network
conversation and dispatching it to
d Mobile agents allow packaging a
interactions can take place locally, as
a destination host where the
shown in Fig. 4.2.1.
comes to reducing the flow of
e Mobile agents are also useful when it
raw data in the network.
stored at remote hosts, these
When very large volumes of data are
f
locality of the data rather that
data should be processed in the
transferred over the network.

Service
App
RPC-Based approach
Host B
Host A
Service
App
Mobile Agent-Based approach
network load.
Fig. 4.2.1, Mobile agents reduce
computations to the data rather
The motto is simple : move the
than the data to the computations.
: By migrating to the location of the resource, a mobile agent
3. Latency faster than from across the network.
much
can interact with the resource
Asynchronous task execution
4.
5. Fault tolerance
They enable use of portable, low cost personalcommunications.
6.
7. Peer topeer communication networks.
8. They permit secure intranet
style communications on public
Disadvantages of mobile agents :
1. The main drawback of
mobile agents isthe security risk involved in
using mobile agents.
A viruscan be disguised as mobile agents and distributed in the network
2. execute the agent.
causing damage to the host machines that
 138 (IT-8) J
Mobile Agent Computing
3. Mobile agent tools are still new and may have security bugs and
vulnerabilities that are yet unknown.
4 Network test suites tend to be relatively large. Managing many light
weight agents introduces additional communication and control
overhead.
5. Mobile agents are not a mature technology and most agent development
tools are alpha or beta version.
Que 4.3. Explain the working and lifecycle of a mobile agent.
Answer
1 The mobile agent is created in the home machine.
2 The mobile agent is dispatched to the host machine 'A' for execution.
3. The agent executes on host machine A'.
4. After execution the agent is cloned to create two copies, one copy is
dispatched to host machine Band the other is dispatched to host machine
C.

Host machine
7

(M.A) (M.A)

(M.A)

Host machine A
3
(M.A) (M.A (M.A
(M.A

Host machine B Host machine C

Fig. 4.3.1,
5. The cloned copies execute on their respective hosts.
6 After execution,host machine Band Csend the mobile agent received
by them back to the home machine.
7. The home machine interacts with the agents and the data brought by
the agents is analyzed. The agents are then disposed.
Amobile agent experiences the following events in its life cycle:
1. Creation : Abrand new agent is born and its state is initialized.
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Mobile Computing
2. Dispatch :An agent
travels to new host.
original is
Cloning : A twin agent is born and the current state of the
3.
duplicated in the clone.
Deactivation: An agent is brought back from aremote host along with
4.
its state to the source machine.
state is lost forever.
5. Disposal: An agent is terminated and its
incoming
6 Communication:Notifies the agent to handle messages inter-agent
primary means of
from other agents, which is the
correspondence.
Que 4.4. Discuss the various mobile agent systems.

Answer
Mobile agent systems :
prevalent systems which are currently
The following systems are the most
available:
1. Agent TCL:
Agent TCL, a product of Dartmouth College, provides an agent
agents implemented in secure
a.

execution environment that allows

themselves over the
language like Safe-TCL and java to transport agents.
network and communicate with local and remote
agent.
b The agent TCLsystem is a model of supportingtransportable
the server model
C. The architecture of agent TCL is based upon
which consists of four levels as shown in Fig. 4.4.1.
Mobile agents

Interpreter Interpreter Interpreter

Server

TCP/IP E-mail

Fig. 4.4.1. The agent TCL architecture.

i. Mobile agent:All the services that are available within the
system are provided by agents, transportable or stationary.
ii. Interpreter : The execution of agents is handled by an
interpreter that is appropriate to the source language of the
mobile agent.
iüi. Server : It handles the management of local agents and
incoming agents. The server also provides mechanism for
enforcing security, providing a hierarchical namespace in which
agents can be referenced and allowing agents to address each
other locally.
140 (IT-8) J Mobile Agent Computing
iv. TCPIP, E-mail :These are the transport mechanism through
which agent communicates with each other. Agents move
between sites in state-oriented fashion by issuing the mobility
commands like agent_jump. The agents execute in the
interpreters and use the facilities provided by the server to
migrate from machine to machine and to communicate with
other agents.
2 TACOMA:
a. The TACOMA (Tromoso and Cornell Moving Agents) is being
developed by University of Tromoso and Cornell.
b The TACOMA system defines an agent based system with
abstractions of agents, places, briefcases, folders and file cabinets.
i. Folders : Folders are named objects that contain a list of
element in raw data form.
ii. Briefcase : Briefcase are containers that each agent owns.
Briefcase contains folders and is used for communication. For
example -an agent might meet another agent by presenting
that agent with a briefcase. The briefcase in this example might
contain a message for the other agent.

Folder Folder; Folder,

Filling cabinet Filling cabinet,
Site1

Folder1 Folder2
Briefcase,
Mobile Agent,

Folder; Folder, Folder,

Filling cabinet
Site

Fig. 4.4.2. TACOMA storage objects.

Mobile Computing 141 (IT-8) J

ii. File cabinets:File cabinets are local storage units associated

with a place. By this way, agents can communicate with other
agents that are not yet at that place. For example -agents
implementing adivide and conquer algorithm can mark places
already visited by leaving afolder in afle cabinet at that place.
C. The TACOMA system uses a firewall type mechanism between the
agent execution and the host system to protect the host from malicious
agents. In this manner agents do not need to be implemented in a safe
language.
Que 4.5. Discuss the requirements for the design of mobile agent

systems. UPTU2011-12, 2012-13; Marks 10

Answer
1 There are many technical challenges to implement mobile agent systems.
2 Most ofthese problems are in the structure of the computational medium,
the environment the agents operate in.
3. Servers must be designed, implemented, and deployed that not only
allow mobile agents to run, but allow them to run safely.
a. Portability:
i. Mobile agent code itself must be portable; when an agent arrives
at a server the server needs to be able to execute that agent.
Most mobile agent systems under development now rely, at
least in part on virtual machines to standardize the execution
environment.
b. Ubiquity :
i In order for mobile agents to be successful they need access to
many different computer resources.
i. Servers for agents must be at common place; there needs to be
awidely accepted framework for executing mobile agents
deployed on many machines across the internet.
C. Network communication:
Mobile agents that live in the network need to be written in a
language that makes network access simple.
ii. It must be easy totransfer objects across the network and to
invoke methods of remote objects.
d. Server security :
Amajor concern specific to mobile agents is the protection of
the servers running the agents.
i. Running arbitrary programs on a machine is dangerous, a
hostile program could destroy the hard drive, steal data, or do
all sorts of other undesirable things.
142 (IT-8) J Mobile Agent Computing
ii. Two types of security are possible to protect servers from
malfunctioning and hostile agents :physical and social.
1. Physical security refers to building servers for agents in
such a way that the agents cannot harm the server.
2 A second approach to server security is using social
enforcement mechanisms to punish the creators of
harmful agents.
e. Agent security :
The complement of server security is agent security; whether
the agent can bust the server on which it is executing.
i. A mobile agent might contain secret information, such as
proprietary data and algorithms.
f. Resource accounting :
1. If economic control and incentive are going to be factors in
netwide resource, use some mechanism to account for the
resources that an agent uses anda way for receiving payment
for those resources is necessary.

Que 4.6. What is mobile agent ? Discuss the server architecture

with the help of diagram. Also, list the security threats to a mobile
agent system. |UPTU2014-15, Marks 10

Answer
Mobile agent : Refer Q. 4.1, Page 135J, Unit-4.
Server architecture : Refer Q. 4.4, Page 139J, Unit-4.
Security threats :
1. Agent-to-Platform:The agent-to-platform category represents the
set of threats in which agents exploit security weakness of an agent
platform or launch attacks against an agent platform.
Following are the set of threats :
a Masquerading :
i When an unauthorized agent claims the identity of another
agent it is said to be masquerading.
ii. The masquerading agent may pose as an authorized agent in
an effort to gain access to services and resources to which it is
not entitled.
ii. The masquerading agent may als0 pose as another
unauthorized agent in an effort to shift the blame for any
actions for which it does not want to be held accountable.
b. Denial of service :
i In this, an agent may attempt to consume or corrupt a host
resource to preclude other agents from accessing the host's
services.
 143 (IT-8) J
Mobile Computing
ii. These denial of service attacks can be launched intentionally
by running attack scripts to exploit system vulnerabilities, or
unintentionally through programming errors.
ii. As a mobile computing paradigm requires an agent platform to
accept and execute an agent whose code may have been
developed outside its organization.
iv. This type of agent may carry malicious code that is designed to
disrupt the services offered by the agent platform, degrade the
performance of the platform, or extract information for which
it has no authorization to access.
C. Unauthorized access :
In this, an agent can obtain access to sensitive data by exploiting
security weakness.
ü. Applying the proper access control mechanism requires the
platform or agent to first authenticate a mobile agent's identity
before it is instantiated on the platform.
iii. An agent that has access to platform and its services without
having the proper authorization can harm other agents and
platform itself.
2 Agent-to-Agent: Agent-to-Agent category represents the set of threats
in which agents exploit security weakness of other agents or launch
attacks against other agents. This set of threats includes the following :
a. Masquerade :
Agent-to-Agent communication can take place directly between
two agents or may require the participation of the underlying
platform and the agent services it provides.
In either case, an agent may attempt to disguise its identity in
an effort to deceive the agent with which it is communicating.
ii. For example, an agent may pose as a well-known vendor of
goods and services, and try to convince another unsuspecting
agent to provide it with credit card numbers, bank account
information and digital cash or other private information.
b. Denial of service:
i Agents can also launch denial of service attacks against other
agents.
For example, repeatedly sending messages to another agent,
or spamming agents with messages, may place undue burden
on the message handling routines of the recipient.
ii. Agents that are being spammed may choose to block messages
from unauthorized agents, but even this task requires some
processing by the agent or its communication proxy.
144 (IT-8) J Mobile Agent Computing

C. Repudiation:
i. Repudiation occurs when an agent, participating in a
transaction or communication, later claims that the transaction
or communication never took place.
Whether the cause for repudiation is deliberate or accidental,
repudiation can lead to serious disputes that may not be easily
resolved unless the proper counter measures are in place.
d. Unauthorized access :
mechanisms in
i. If the agent platform has weak or no control
place, an agent can directly interfere with another agent by
invoking its public methods (for example, attempt buffer
overflow, reset to initial state etc.), or by accessing and
modifying the agent's data or code.
3 Platform-to-Agent : The platform-to-agent category represents the
set of threats in which platform compromise the security of agents. This
set of threats includes the following:
Masquerade :
in
One agent platfornm can masquerade as another platform
destination
an effort to deceive a mobile agent as to its true
and corresponding security domain.
i. An agent platform masquerading as trusted third
party may
and
be able to cheat unsuspecting agents to the platform
extract sensitive information from these agents.
both the visiting agent
ii. The masquerading platform may harm assumed.
and the platform whose identity it has
b. Denial of service :
the
i When an agent arrives at an agent platform, it expects
provide fair
platform to execute the agent's request faithfully,
allocation of resources and abide by the quality of service
agreements.
service
iü. Amalicious agent platform however may ignore agent such
requests, introduce unacceptable delays for critical tasks
execute
simply not
as placing market orders in a stock market, without
the agent's code or even terminate the agent
notification.
c. Eavesdropping :
and
i. The eavesdropping threat involves the interception
monitoring of secret communications.
In eavesdropping, agent platforms cannot only monitor
communications, but als0 can monitor every instruction
executed by the agent, all the unencrypted or public data it
brings to the platform, and all the subsequent data generated
on the platform.
Mobile Computing 145 (IT-8) J
ii. Since the platform has access to the agent's code, state and
data, the visiting agent must be wary of the fact that it may be
exposing proprietary algorithms, trade secrets, negotiation
strategiesor other sensitive information.
iv. Even though the agent may not be directly exposing secret
information, the platform may be ahble to infer meaning from
the types of services requested and from the identity of the
agents with which it communicates.
d. Alteration :
i When an agent arrives at an agent platform it is exposing its
code, state and data to the platform.
ii. Since an agent may visit several platforms under various
security domains throughout its lifetime, mechanisms must
be in place to ensure the integrity of an agent's code, state and
data.
üi. Acompromised or malicious platform must be prevented from
modifying an agent's code, state or data without being detected.
iv. Modification of an agents code, and thus the subsequent
behaviour of the agent on other platforms, can be detected by
having the original author digitally sign the agent's code.
4 Other-to-Agent Platform : The other-to-agent platform category
represents the set of threats, in which external entities, including agents
and agent platforms, threaten the security of an agent platiorm. This
set of threats includes the following:
a. Masquerade :
i
F: Agents can request platform services both remotely and locally.
An agent on a remote platform can masquerade as another
agent and request services and resources for which it is not
authorized.
iii. Agents masquerading as other agents may act in conjunction
with a malicious plYtform to help deceive another remote
platform or they may act alone.
iv. Aremote platform can also masquerade as another platform
and mislead unsuspecting platforms or agents about its true
identity.
b. Unauthorized access :
1
Remote users, processes, and agents may request resources
for which they are not authorized.
i. Remote access to the platform and the host machine itself
must be carefully protected, since conventional attack seripts
freely available on the internet can be used to subvert the
operating system and directly gain control of all resources.
146 (IT-8)J
Mobile Agent Computing
or security
iüi. Remote administration of the platform's attributesresponsible
policy may be desirable for an administrator that is
remote
for several distributed platforms, but allowing account
administration may make the system administrator's
or session the target of an attack.
C. Denial of service:
remotely and
Agent platform services.can be accessed both
locally.
inter-platform
The agent services offered by the platform and
communications can be disrupted by common denial of service
attacks.
iii. Agent platforms are also susceptible to all the conventional
denial of service attacks aimed at the underlying operating
system or communication protocols.
the
These attacks are tracked by organizations such as
Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) at the Carnegie
Mellon University and the Federal Computer Incident Response
Capability (FedCIRC).

Que 4.7. Why security concerns in traditional systems are simple

Marks 10
than those in mobile systems ? Discuss. UPTU 2011-12,

Answer
Traditional systems vulnerabilities :
1. As the internet is increasingly becoming part of the corporate network,
the organizations information systems have become vulnerable to actions
from outsiders.
2. The architecture of traditional web-based application typically includes
a web client, a server and corporate information systems linked to back
end databases.
3. Each of these components is exposed to security challenges and
vulnerabilities due to their connection to the internet.
4. For example, a database that has been used internally for several years
but is now connected to the internet.
5. This new connection will expose the database to a much larger and
more varied set of users (including hackers) than ever before.
Wireless and mobile systems :
1. The security in a mobile code environment cannot rely on trust
relationship between the server and an agent because they are generally
not part of the same administrative domain.
2. In addition, the problem of protecting the agent and its results from
malicious and faulty servers arises.
 147 (IT-8) J
Mobile Computing
3. Increased use of wireless communications further increases the chances
of eavesdropping and of compromising the integrity of information being
transferred between sources and destinations.

4.While it is possible to tap a wired connection also, wireless connections

are easier to intercept by using simple antennas.
5 For example, while the Wi-Fi systems are quite popular, many
vulnerabilities of Wi-Fihave been well documented.
Que 4.8. What are the security requirements in mobile agent
systems ?

Answer
Security requirements in mobile agent :
1 The users of networked computer system have four main security
requirements: confidentiality, integrity, accountability and availability.
have these same
2 The users of agent and mobile agent frameworks also
security requirements.
This section provides a brief overview of these security
requirements
3.
and how they apply to agent frameworks:
a, Confidentiality :
i Any private data stored on a platform or carried by an agent
must remain confidential.
Agent frameworks must be able to ensure that their intra
and inter-platform communications remain confidential.
iüi. Eavesdroppers can gather information about an agent's
activities not only from the content of the messages exchanged,
but also from the message flow from one agent to another
agent or agents.
b. Integrity :
The agent platform must protect agents from unauthorized
modification of their code, state, and data and ensure that only
authorized agents or processes carry out any modification of
shared data.
The agent itself cannot prevent a malicious agent platform
from tampering with its code, state, and data, but the agent
can take measures to detect this tampering.
C. Accountability :
Each process, human user, or agent on a given platform must
be held accountable for their actions.
i. In order to be held accountable, each process, human user, or
agent must be uniquely identified, authenticated and audited.
 148 (IT-8) J Mobile Agent Computing
ii. Examples of the actions for which they must be held
accountable include: access to an object such as a file, or
making administrative changes to a platform security
mechanism.
iv. Accountability requires maintaining an audit log of security,
relevant events that have occurred and listing each event and
the agent or process responsible for that event.
d. Availability :
i The agent platform must be able to ensure the availability of
both data and services to local and remote agents.
The agent platform must be able to provide controlled
concurrency, support for simultaneous access, deadlock
management and exclusive access as required.
iii. Agent platform must be able to detect and recover from system
software and hardware failures.
iv. While the platform can provide some level of fault-tolerance
and fault-recovery, agents may be required to assume
responsibility for their own fault-recovery.
Que 4.9. What are the security measures for mobile agents ?

Answer
Security measures for mobile agent :
The following available technologies and research efforts addresses the
security issues arising from the mobility property of mobileagents:
1. Protecting agents :
a. This is due to the fact that an agent is completely susceptible toan
agent platform and cannot prevent malicious behaviour from
occurring.
b. Some more general purpose techniques for protecting an agent
include the following:
i Partial result encapsulation :
1. Encapsulation may be done for different purposes with
different mechanisms, such as providing confidentiality using
encryption or for integrity and accountability using digital
signature.
2. In general, there are three alternative ways to encapsulate
partial results:
Provide the agent with a means for encapsulating the
information.
b. Rely on the encapsulation capabilities of the agent
platform.
Mobile Computing 149 (IT-8) J

C.Rely on a trusted third party to timestamp a digital

fingerprint of the result.
ii. Mutual itinerary recording :
1 One interesting variation of path histories is a general scheme
for allowing an agent's itinerary to be recorded and tracked by
another cooperating agent and vice-versa, in a mutually
supportive arrangement.
2. When moving between agent platforms, an agent conveys the
last platform,current platform and next platform information
to the cooperating peer through an authenticated channel.
3 The peer maintains a record of the itinerary and takes
appropriate action when inconsistencies are noted.
4. Attention is paid so that an agent avoids platform already visited
by its peer.
5 The rationale behind this scheme is founded on the assumption
that only a few agent platforms are malicious and even if an
agent encounters one, the platform is not likely to collaborate
with another malicious platform being visited by the peer.
6 Therefore, by dividing up the operations of the application
between two agents, certain malicious behaviour of an agent
platform can be detected.
ii. Execution tracing :
1. Execution tracing is a technique for detecting unauthorized
modifications of an agent through the faithful recording of the
agent's behaviour during its execution on each agent platform.
2 The technique requires each platform involved tocreate and
retain a non-repudiatable log or trace of the operations
performed by the agent while executing on the platform to
submit a cryptographic hash of the trace upon conclusion as a
trace summary or fingerprint.
3. A trace is composed of a sequence of statements identifiers
and platform signature information.
4 The signature of the platform is needed only for those
instructions that depend on interactions with the computational
environment maintained by the platform for instructions that
rely only on the value of interval variables, a signature is not
required and therefore, is omitted.
2 Protecting the agent platform :
a. One of the main concerns with an agent system implementation is
ensuring that agents are not able to interfere with one another or
with the underlying agent platform.
b. One common approach for accomplishing this is to establish separate
isolated domains for each agent and the platform, and control all
interdonmain access.
150 (IT-8) J
Mobile Agent Computing
C. In traditional terms, this concept is referred to as a reference
monitor.
d. Techniques devised for protecting the agent platform include the
following:
i. Software-based fault isolation :
1. It is a method of isolating application modules into distinct
fault domains enforced by software.
2. The technique allows untrusted programs written in an
unsafe language, such as C, to be executed safely within
the single virtual address space of an application.
3. Untrusted machine interpretable code modules are
transformed so that all memory accesses are confined to
code and data segments within their fault domain.
4. Access to system resources can also be controlled through
a unique identifier associated with each domain.
5. The technique is commonly referred to as sandboxing.
ii. Signed code:
1. A
fundamental technique for protecting an agent system
is signing code or other objects with a digital signature.
2. Adigital signature serves as a means of confirming the
authenticity of an object, its origin, and its integrity.
3. Typically the code signer is either the creator of the agent,
the user of the agent, or some entity that has reviewed
the agent.
4 Because an agent operates on behalf of an end-user or
organization, mobile agent systems commonly use the
signature of the user as an indication of the authority
under which the agent operates.
iii. Proof carrying code :
1 The approach of proof carrying code obligates the code
producers (for example, author of an agent) to formally
prove that the program possesses safety properties
previously stipulated by the code consumer (for example,
security policy of the agent platform).
2 It is a prevention technique, while the code signing is an
authenticity and identification techniques used together,
but not prevent the execution of unsafe code.
Que 4.10. Explain the various security threat during data
transfer in mobile communication and give suitable example of
authentication and privacy preceeding for mobile computing.
UPTU2012-13, Marks 10|
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Answer
Security threats in mobile communication :
from attacks or threats.
1. Security system is a system to defend our assets
2. Attacks are carried out at the point of vulnerability.
3. When the vulnerability is exploited for some interest or
selfish motive,
it is an attack on the system.
4. Where the vulnerability is exploited, there is a loss.
or an
5 This loss can be either of static information asset (static asset)
information asset in transit (dynamicasset).
6. Attacks on dynamic assets can be of the following types:
a. Interception :
part
i. An unauthorized party gaining access to an asset will be a
of this attack.
ii This is an attack on confidentiality like unauthorized copying
of files or tappinga conversation between parties.
iüi. Some of the sniffing attacks fall in this category.
b. Modification:
i An unauthorized party gaining control of an asset and
tampering with it is part of this attack.
This is an attack on integrity like changing the content of a
message being transmitted through the network.
of
ii. Different types of man-in-the-middle attacks are the part
modification attack.
Fabrication :
i An authorized party inserts counterfeited objects into the
system, for example, impersonating someone and inserting a
spurious message in a network.
d Interruption :
i An asset is destroyed or made unusable.
This is an attack on availability.
ii. This attack can be ona static asset or a dynamic asset.
iv. An example could be cutting a communication line or making
the router so busy that a user cannot use a server in a network.
7 Attack on static assets can be of the following types:
a. Virus and worms :
These are a type of program that replicates and propagates from
one system to another.
Most of the virus do malicious destructive functions in the system.
152 (IT-8) J Mobile Agent Computing
b. Denial of Service:
These are attacks on the system to prevent legitimate users from
using the service.
C. Intrusion :

These are people or software, which enter into computer systems

and perform functions without the knowledge of owner of the
asset.

ii. These are also called hackers.

d. Replay attack:
i Ina replay attack the opponent passively captures the data without
trying to analyze the content.
i. At a later time, the same is used in the same sequence to impersonate
an event and gain unauthorized access to resource.
e Buffer overflow attack :

In a buffer overflow attack, the vulnerability of an executable

program is exploited to force a stack overflow condition, including
the program counter of the process to change, which further work
for attacker.

Digital AMPS (D-AMPS) :

1. IS-54 and IS-136 are second generation (2G) mobile phone systems,
known as digital AMPS (D-AMPS).
2. It was once prevalent throughout the America, particularly in the United
States and Canada in the 1990s.
3. D-AMPS is considered end-of-life and existing networks have mostly
been replaced by GSMGPRS or CDMA 2000 technologies.
4. This s;stem is most often referred to as TDMA (Time Division Multiple
Access).
5. D-AMPS use existing AMPS channels and allows for smooth transition
between digital and analog systems in the same area.
6 Capacity was increased over the preceding analog design by dividing
30 KHz channel pair into three time slots and digitally compressing the
voice data, yielding three times the call capacity in asingle call.
7. A
digital system also made calls more secure because analog scanners
could not access digital signals.
Mobile 153 (IT-8) J
FDMAComputing
CTO/1
AMPS CT2 IMT-FT
NMT
TDMA
X IS-136 DECT
TDMA EDGE.
IMT-SC
D-AMPS
GSM IS-136HS
+GPRS
UMC-136
PDC
IMT-DS
CDMA UTRAFDD/W-CDMA
IMT-TC
UTRA TDDTD-CDMA
IMT-TC
TD-SCMA
IS-95 cdma2000 IMT-MC
cdma One 1X cdma2000 1X EV-DO
1X EV-DO
(3X)
1G 2G 2.5G 3G
Fig. 4.10.1. Development of different generations of mobile
telecommunication systems.

Que 4.11. Describe fault tolerance in mobile computing

environment in detail. UPTU2013-14, 2015-16; Marks 10
OR
Describe fault tolerance issues involve in mobile computing. What
are the monitoring processes ? UPTU2014-15, Marks 10
Answer
1. The ability of mobile agents to react dynamically to unfavourable
situations and events, make it easier to build robust and fault tolerant
distributed systems.
2. For example, if a host is being shut down, all agents executing on that
machine are warned, whenever possible and given time to dispatch and
continue their operations on another host in the network.
3 The ability of the mobile agents to move from one platform to another in
a heterogeneous environment has been made possible by the use of
virtual machine and interpreters.
4. Virtual machines and interpreters, however, can offer only limited
support for preservation and resumption of the execution state in
heterogeneous environments because of differing representations in
the underlying hardware.
5. For example, although a number of research efforts are underway to
address this issue, the full execution state of an object cannot currently
be retrieved in java.
154 (IT-8) J
Mobile Agent Computing
frame stack
6. Information such as the status ofthe program counter and
is currently off limits for java programs.
7. Although mobile agents possess a great deal of autonomy and perform
well in disconnected operations, the failure of the home platform or
research projects,
other platforms that the agents rely on a number ofare using modified
such as Nomads at the university of West Florida security
Java Virtual Machines to capture the frame stack, to provide
functionality.
services that can seriously reduce their intended
8 Even though a mobile agent can become more fault tolerant by moving
safe operation of
to another machine, the mobile agents reliance on the functionality.
a safe home or trusted platform places restrictions on
its
trade-off between
9 Designers of mobile agent platforms are also faced with
security and fault tolerance.
security risks involved in "multi
10. For example, in order to address thearchitectures have been built on
hop agent mobility, some agent central
centralized client-server models requiring agents to return to a
server before moving on to another host machine.
manner renders all the
11. Clearly, addressing the security risks in thiscentral
mobile agents vulnerable to a failure of the server and raises
scalability issues.
Monitoring process :
1 prediction mechanism is built to identify eritical host agents s0 as to
A
prevent failure.
2 Therefore, updating of information in the system can be done in a
consistent fashion.
3.
Here, this mechanism includes the weighing calculation i.e., the weights
of hosts are considered.
4. The mobile agents which act as monitoring agents detect the unexpected
situations and then help in recovery.
5. Further the host dependence calculation is proposed by the use of an
algorithm to update weights.
6 In other words critically of hosts in mobile system is being calculated.
7. The aim is to monitor constantly but in order to obtain reliable behaviour
the host agents are monitored dynamically which will result in
improvement of response of system.
8. Hence, proposed monitoring mechanism has the following components :
a, Monitor Agent (MoA):
1. In the whole module of monitoring, these are at the lower
level i.e., they reside on hosts that provide services.
These service hosts keep a record of information in the form
of log tables.
 155 (IT-8) J
Mobile Computing
ii. These agents monitor the surrounding atmosphere and gather
information of exchanging messages.
b. Manager Agent (MaM):
i. This resides at the higher level and controls the agents during
monitoring.
It can correlate different local events from various monitored
hosts in time.
C. Alert Agent (AlA) :
i It is made up of many blocks like time stamps that include the
alert message creation time, threshold event detection time,
alert in case of any fault and alarm information as well.
ii. But this works under the MaM.

PART-2
Transaction Processing in Mobile Computing Environment.

CONCEPT OUTLINE : PART-2

A mobile transaction is a distributed transaction where some
parts of the computation are executed on mobile host and some
parts on non-mobile hosts.
Transaction processing is information processing that is divided
into individual and invisible operations called transaction.

Questions-Answers
Long Answer Type and Medium Answer Type Questions

Que 4.12.Define the term transaction and transaction processing.

Answer
Transaction :
1. The transaction is amodeling abstraction that groups multiple database
accesses as an atomic unit for the purpose of recovery, concurrency and
consistency.
2. Amobile transaction is a distributed transaction where some parts of
the computation are executed on mobile host and some parts on non
mobile hosts.
156 (IT-8) J Mobile Agent Computing
3. Transactions guarantee the consistency of data records when multiple
users or processes perform concurrent operations on them.
4. The access of distributed resources for example, database on different
computers within a transaction is called a distributed transaction for
committing the results, the peer involved in a distributed transaction
usually communicate via the two phase commit protocol (2PC).
5. Only distributed transaction processing (DTP) offers the posibility to
control the state of a mobile agent system.
6 At present, many type of mobile computing devices such as laptops,
personal digital assistant (PDA)are available.
7 The capacities of these mobile aevices become more powerful.
8. They have more processing speed and longer operating time.
9 Mobile computing devices are becoming the major work processing
equipments in every daily activity.
10. Combining with the expanding of the high-speed network like the
internet, mobile computing applications are growing rapidly.
Transaction processing :
1. Transaction processing is information processing that is divided into
individual and invisible operations called transaction.
2. Transaction processing is designed to maintain databases in a known,
consistent state, by ensuring that any operation carried out on the
database that are interdependent and either all completed successfully
or allcancelled successfully.
3. Transaction processing allows multiple individual operations on a
database to be linked together automatically as a single, individual
transaction.
4 The transaction processing system ensures that either all operations in
a transaction are completed without error, or none of them are.
5. If some of the operations are completed but errors occur when the
others are attempted, the transaction processing system "rolls back" all
of the operations of the transaction, thereby erasing all traces of the
transaction and restoring the database to the consistent, known state
that it was in before processing of the transaction began.
6. If all operations of a transaction are completed successfully, the
transaction is committed" by the system and all changes to the database
are made permanent; the transaction cannot be rolled back once this is
done.
7 If the computer system crashes in the middle of a transaction the
transaction processing system guarantees that all operations in any
uncommitted transaction are cancelled.
Mobile Computing 157 (IT-8) J

Features of transaction processing :

1. Rapid response :
Fast performance with arapid response time is critical.
b. Business cannot afford to have customers waiting for a TPS
(Transaction Processing System) to respond, the turnaround time
from the input of the transaction to the production for the output
must be a few seconds or less.
2. Reliability:
a. Many organizations rely heavily on their TPS; a breakdown will
disrupt operations or even stop the business.
b. For a TPS tobe effective, its failure rate must be very low.
C. Ifa TPS does fail, then quick and accurate recovery must be possible.
d. This makes welldesigned backup and recovery procedures essential.
3. Inflexibility :
a. A TPS wants every transaction to be processed in the same way
regardless of the user, the customer or the time for day.
b. If a TPS were flexible, there would be too many opportunities for
non-standard operations.
4. Controlled processing :
a. The processing in a TPS must support an organization's operations.
b. For example, if an organization allocates roles and responsibilities,
they must be able to process and accomplish it.
Que 4.13. Describe how transaction processing can be done in
mobile computing environment.
Answer
Transaction processing in mobile computing :
1. A mobile transaction is defined as a transaction submitted from a mobile
host.
2. The mobile host, which issues transaction and the mobile host, which
receives the result,can be different.
3. A transaction in mobile environment is different than the transactions
in the centralized or distributed database performed in the following
ways :
a. The mobile transaction might have to split their computations into
sets of operations, some of which execute on a mobile host while
others execute on stationary host.
b. Amobile transaction shares its states and partial results with other
transaction due to disconnection and mobility.
C The mobile transactions require computations and communications
to be supported by stationary host.
158 (IT-8) J Mobile Agent Computing
d. As the mobile host move from one cell to another, the state of
transaction, state of accessed data objects, and the location
information also move.
e The mobile transactions are long-lived transactions due to mobility
of both the data and users, due to the frequent disconnections.
f The mobile transaction should support and handle concurrency,
recovery, disconnection and mutual consistency of replicated data
objects.
4. Mobile transaction is more complicated than the conventional transaction
in both the design and execution states.
5. When mobile host moves from one cell to another cell, many computing
activities like establishing new communication channel, forwarding the
state of transaction to new mobile support station are involved.
6. The execution of mobile transaction is not only unpredictable but also
location dependent.
Coordinator Participant
Can_commit 2
Phase 1 :
Voting in case of
Yes failure
Write
data to Rollback
if all votes = yes Do_commit per
manent
storage

Have_ Phase 2:
commited completion
all participants sent
Have _committed
forget transaction

Fig. 4.13.1. Two Phase Commit Protocol (2PC).

7. Some of the techniques developed in conventional transaction such as
two phase commit (2PC) protocol, are also apply in mobile transaction.
8. For committing the result in adistributed transaction, the peers involved
in a transaction usually communicate via the 2PC protocol.
First phase :
The initiator of a transaction takes the role of the coordinator,
which in the first phase collects the votes about the result of
transaction from different partners.
 159 (IT-8) J
Mobile Conmputing
b. Second phase :
In the second phase, it transmits the result (commit: make the
results of transaction permanent; or rollback: discard all
changes) to the other partners, which subsequently confirm
the receipt. Thus, the 2PC is quite robust for the communication
in distributed system.
Que 4.14. Discuss the various mobile transaction models.
OR
Discuss the schems of mobile transaction management.
OR
What do you mean by online transaction processing ? Explain
various mobile transaction models. UPTU2013-14,Marks 10

Answer
Online transaction processing :
1. Online transaction processing, or OLTP, refers to a class ofsystems that
facilitate and manage transaction-oriented applications, typically for data
entry and retrieval transaction processing.
2. OLTP has also been used to refer to processing in which the system
responds immediately to user requests. An automatic teller machine
(ATM) for bank is an example of a commercial transaction processing
application.
3 Online transaction processing increasingly requires support for
transactions that span a network and may include more than one
company.
4 For this reason, new OLTP software uses client/server processing and
brokering software that allows transactions to run on diferent computer
platforms in a network.
5 In large applications, efficient OLTP may depend on sophisticated
transaction management software (such as CICS) and/or database
optimization tactics to facilitate the processing of large numbers of
concurrent updates to an 0LTP-oriented database.
6. For even more demanding decentralized database systems, OLTP
brokering programs can distribute transaction processing among
multiple computers on a network.
7. OLTP is often integrated into SOA service-oriented architecture and
web services.
8 Because there is a need for transactions you will need online processing.
9 Online transaction processing has two key benefits: simplicity and
efficiency.
10. Reduced paper trails and the faster, more accurate forecasts for revenues
and expenses are both examples of how OLTP makes things simpler for
businesses.
160 (IT-8) J Mobile Agent Computing
11. It also provides a concrete foundation for a stable organization because
of the timely updating.
12. Another simplicity factor is that of allowing consumers the choice of
how they want to pay, making it that much more enticing to make
transactions.
13. OLTP is proven efficient because it vastly broadens the consumer base
for an organization, the individual processes are faster, and it's available
24/7.
Various mobile transactions models :
1. A mobile transaction is a distributed transaction where some parts of
the computation are executed on mobile host and some parts on non
mobile hOsts.
2 The use of wireless medium and the mobility of data consumers and
producers affect transaction processing in various ways.
3 Location and time of mobile host are the two major factors that affect
mobile transaction processing.
4 Twomobile transaction models are available as follows:
a. High Commit Mobile Transaction Model (HiCoMo) :
i The execution model is mainly for processing aggregate data
stored in a data warehouse which resides in mobile units.
iüi. Since the data warehouse resides in mobile units, HiCoMo
transactions are always initiated on mobile unit where they
are processed in a disconnected model.
ii. As a result transaction commit1nents are quite fast.
iv. The base database resides on the fixed network.
V. The structure of HiCoMo transaction is based on nested
transaction model.
vi. It is manipulated by transaction called base or source
transactions. These transactions initiated at the fixed network.
vii. To install updates of HiCoMo transaction they must be
converted tosource transactions.
vii. This conversion is done by a transaction transformation
function.
b. Kangaroo mobile transaction model :
It captured both data and the movement of mobile unit.
i. The model based on a split transaction and enforces the ACID
properties.
iii. Aglobal or parent Kangaroo transaction, KT, is composed of a
number of subtransactions. Each subtransaction is similar to
an ACID transaction, which is composed of a set of reads and
writes. These subtransactions are called Joey Transaction (JT)
 161 (IT-8) J
Mobile Computing
and are local to a base station.
transaction, a base station creates
iv. Upon initiation of a Kangaroo
a JT for its execution.
the initial BS (base
V. AKT, when initiate by a MU (mobile unit), identity and
station) immediately creates a JT withaunique
become responsible for its execution.
cell, the BS of this cell
vi. When the MU migrates to another transaction.
takes control of the execution of this
split in two JTs,
vii. When a MUencounters with handoff, KT is
thus the mobility of a MU is captured by splitting a KT.
management.
Que 4.15. Discuss the schemes of mobiletransaction
transaction management.
List out various issues concerned to
UPTU2013-14, Marks 10
OR
processing
Discuss various issues which are related to transaction
in mobile computing. UPTU2011-12, 2012-13; Marks 10

Answer
Mobile transaction schemes: Refer Q. 4.14, Page 159J, Unit-4.
Issues of transaction processing in mobile computing environment :
highly distributed
1 Mobile environments can be considered to be similar to
environments in many respects.
hosts are not
2 But unlike in distributed environments, locations of some
permanent in mobile environments.
bandwidth, frequent
3 This along with the low communication
disconnections and high vulnerability throws up many challenges to
researchers.
a. Data consistency and concurrency control:
i In mobile environments, data could be replicated on a number
of servers throughout the network.
Some of these servers could be MUs. Moreover, a MH might
operate on cached data while being disconnected from the
fixed network.
iüi. The data conflicts arising in mobile environments could partly
be due to the locality of the users accessing the data.
iv. The execution of a mobile transaction could also be distributed
and relocated among fixed hosts and the mobile nodes.
V
The non-deterministic lifetime of a mobile transaction and the
low bandwidth of communication links are other factors that
affect concurrency control and cache management.
 162 (IT-8) J Mobile Agent Computing
b. Infrastructure requirements :
For any model to be successful, it is important that it can be
moved from the research labs and deployed in the real world.
i. Assuming a wireless communication infrastructure to be well
in place, it is important to determine the additional resources
required for having a mobile transaction system in place.
i. These resources could range from protocols for location
sensitive service access to mechanisms for optimized query
management and controlled query release mechanisms.
C. Communication costs :
i. The high cost of the communication links is one of the major
constraints in mobile environments.
i. Efficient utilization of bandwidth is thus an important factor
on evaluating a transaction model.
d. Relocation mechanism and user profiles :
i. Mobile agents are processes or set of processes that perform
an activity on the fixed network on behalf of the MU.
ii. These agents will typically be a transaction activity that access
several databases and report some results to the mobile node.
iii. Relocation of transaction execution or mobile agents is
necessary to improve response times in mobile environments.
iv. Performance can still be improved if the user profiles or user
directivescan be used to effect anticipatory relocation or to
avoid unnecessary relocation.
e. Scalability :
i As mobile computing grows to be more affordable and popular,
the number of MUs handled by every base station could be
large.
Hence, it is very important that a mobile transaction model
scale up efficiently.
Que 4.16. Discuss the challenges in transaction processing.
What are the counter measures to security threat in computing
environment ? UPTU 2014-15, Marks 10|
Answer
Challenges in transaction processing :
1. Enhanced failure model:
a. Compared to fixed-wired networks, mobile environments suffer
from a variety of failures : Message loss occurs in fixed wired
networks due to rare problems like buffer over-flows or data packet
collisions.
Mobile Computing 163 (IT-8) J

b. In mobile networks, however, message loss occurs more frequently.

C. For example, if the sender or receiver moves out of scope, if the
channel suffers from interference, if obstacles hamper the
transmission, or if the sender's or receiver's battery drains suddenly
during message transmission.
d. Network partitioning due to the movement of participants occurs
in mobile environment more frequently than in fixed-wired
networks, in which this event is very seldom.
2. Message reception model:
a. In mobile adhoc networks, a message that is sent is not only received
by the destined recipient.
b. Each participant that is close to the sender can hear the message.
C. When a routing strategy is used, participants those are located
close to the path that the message takes will get the message.
3. Device controllability :
Distributed databases in fixed-wired networks are usually used for
performance and availability reasons.
b Thus, there is often a single database owner that controls all of its
databases.
C In mobile networks, however, each user owns and controls only a
single device.
d In case of wirelesS network, we cannot guarantee that all individual
users cooperate and do not move away, since there is no central
instance that controls the devices.
4. Compensation applicability :
Transaction processing models that apply the concept of
compensation, explicitly allow databases to run into a possibly
inconsistent state that is compensated later.
b. However, the models using compensation assume that databases
are somehow connected to a single site that controls the
compensation.
C. Thus, participants having inconsistent states will not participate in
proceeding transactions with ifferent participants as long as their
inconsistent states have not been compensated.
5. Capabilities:The mobile devices have limited capabilities like memory,
processing, and storage constraints.
6. Input mechanism(s):
The most common input mechanisms for mobile devices are built
in keypads, pens and touch sereen interfaces.
b. Usually, PDAs contain software keyboards, some PDAs may also
support external keyboards.
164 (IT-8) J Mobile Agent Computing
7. Network stack
Measures to security threats in computing environment : Refer
Q. 4.6, Page 142J, Unit-4.

VERY IMPORTANT QUESTIONS

|Following questions are very important. These questions
maybe asked in your SESSIONALS as well as
UNIVERSITY EXAMINATION.

Q. 1. What do you understand by mobile agent ?

Ans. Refer Q. 4.1.

Q.2. Explain the working and lifecycle of mobile agent.

Ans. Refer Q. 4.3.
Q.3. State the security threats to mobile agent.
Ans. Refer Q. 4.6.

Q.4. What are security requirements and measures for mobile

agent system ?
Ans. Refer Q. 4.8 and Q. 4.9.
Q.5. Discuss the various mobile transaction models.
Ang, Refer Q. 4.14.
Q.6. Discuss various issues related to transaction processing.
Ans. Refer Q. 4.15.