The Real Challenges of Mobile Agents.

The article discusses demerits of innovative concept for creating distributed systems or Mobile Agents. The article discusses that the security problem of an agent execution environment has not been solved by the appearance of Java programming language. The Java sandbox concept protects the server unilaterally against a malicious agent by preventing the agent from accessing sensitive system software. Conversely, there is nothing to prevent the server from trying to tamper with the agent. Other security problem is virus scanning alone. Viruses and agents are both mobile code acting autonomously on behalf of a possibly untrustworthy party, with benevolent or malicious intentions. It is difficult to judge which behavior prevails unless the code is analyzed or the actual activity becomes apparent and allows them to be classified into agents and viruses. The absence of a social and legal framework is clearly the biggest challenge for the controllable deployment of mobile agents. The real challenges lie in complementary concepts for the control of populations of mobile agents, such as multiagent systems, able to provide solutions for application areas characterized by inherently decentralized information.