Analysis of threats

  Various kinds of attacks and threats could compromise the security of mobile agent based management systems. An attack is an attempt to illegally access a system, a resource or information or to execute malicious code. Attacks are classified as active and passive attacks [#!stal98!#]. The ability of an attacker to change something is characteristic for an active attack. In a passive attack he only collects information but does not to actively manipulate an object. In the following we take a closer look at attacks focusing on those to mobile agent based management systems. As mentioned in the last section every entity as well as every relation between two entities can be a target of an attack. Therefore, we distinguish attacking an entity from attacking a relation.

There are three kinds of relations in the interaction model (figure ): communication, execution and calling relations. It must be distinguished between attacks which are generally possible for all kinds of relations and those which are special to a particular kind of attack (see figure ).

  

Figure: Classification of threats and attacks