Host-Based Security Challenges and Controls: A Survey of Contemporary Research

Security in host-based computing continues to be an area of regular research. Problems in host-based security exist in three principal areas: application protection, host environment protection, and data protection. These three areas echo the security issues for mobile agents: protecting agents from hostile hosts, protecting hosts from agents, and protecting data in transit as identified in Vuong and Peng (2001). Mobile agents are specialized applications which travel between hosts. Mobility is achieved by passing data and execution parameters from one host to another. A parallel can be drawn between mobile agents and host-based applications considering both perform host-based computations. In this paper we regard the security challenges for mobile agents equivalent to those of applications installed on a host. Furthermore, we also consider a circular threat that exists between applications and the host environment.