Mobile agent security with the IPEditor development tool and the mobile UNITY language

Many people consider that security is one of the biggest problems for practical use of mobile agents that move around the network and do their tasks. In this paper, we assert that this issue can be effectively managed by using IPEditor, the development support tool of mobile multi-agent applications that we have been released, and Mobile UNITY, a formal specification language of mobile agent applications. IPEditor helps developers to design applications with visual supports of agent behaviors. In our method, we translate an IPEditor model to a Mobile UNITY program that is the formal specification of the agent behaviors. In addition, we describe the security requirements by the Mobile UNITY logic notation. Thus we can verify the security requirements by proving that the mobile UNITY program, therefore the IPEditor model, satisfies the mobile UNITY logic notation. We present an example of an electronic catalog (e-catalog) application and illustrate the effectiveness of our proposal.