Mobile Agents

174  Chapter 5 Mobile Agent Security

to other agencies. If the malicious agency has successfully analyzed the code,

it might even understand the strategy of the agent, for example, in price

negotiations. In our airfare example, the agent could be manipulated so that

no later price offer could be lower than the one of the malicious agency.

Whereas all the aforementioned attacks seek to modify the agent’s code

permanently, the agency can also change code temporarily and can mod-

ify agent execution by attacking the agent’s control flow. Attacks targeted at

the agent’s control flow include direct manipulations of the control flow and

malicious execution of the agent in general. A useful manipulation of the

control flow could be to skip security checks or ...