Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Mobile agent technology facilitates intelligent operation in software systems with less human interaction. Major challenge to deployment of mobile agents include secure transmission of agents and preventing unauthorized access to resources between interacting systems, as either hosts, or agents, or both can act maliciously. The Anchor toolkit, designed by LBNL, handles the transmission and secure management of mobile agents in a heterogeneous distributed computing environment. It provides users with the option of incorporating their security managers. This paper concentrates on the architecture, features, access control and deployment of Anchor toolkit. Application of this toolkit in a secure distributed CVS environment is discussed as a case study.