[moca] Mobile Agents: Ten reasons for failure

[Massimo Merro <merro@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear All,

the subjet of this email is the title of a paper by Giovanni Vigna 
(Univ. California, S. Barbara)
which can be found in Vigna's home page at
http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~vigna/pub/2004_vigna_MDM04.pdf.

Vigna's research interests include: Network security, Intrusion 
detection, Mobile Code....

Although it is only two pages long,  the paper contains strong 
criticisms against
Mobile Agents (a' la Ambients) advocating simpler form of mobility like: 
(i) code
on demand (ie applets) or (ii) upload of code to a server for remote 
evaluation (a' la Dpi).

As the title says the paper states 10 reasons for failures of the Mobile 
Agent paradigm.
So, it would be interesting to trigger a discussion on it. In 
particular, from my point
of view, at least three of those criticisms

5) Mobile Agents are difficult to authenticate and control
6) Mobile Agent can be brainwashed
7) Mobile Agents cannot keep secrets.

deserve to be discussed, and I would appreciate very much if some of you,
working on Mobile Agents, would like to express his/her opinion.

Thank you!

Best Regards,

--Massimo.

 
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