Trust enhanced authorization for mobile agents

Trust has been recognized as an important aspect for mobile agent security. In this paper, we develop a logic based trust model which enables the capturing of a comprehensive set of trust relationships to enhance the security of conventional access control mechanisms in a mobile based applications. We first discuss the notion of trust and its relevance to mobile agent security. Next we define a logic program based language to facilitate the modelling process. To enforce the security related trustworthy behaviours, we then define a set of general rules to capture the semantics. Finally, the language is applied in a mobile agent context to demonstrate how the trust can be explicitly modelled and reasoned about to support better security decisions for the mobile agent based systems.