Proposal Number: 0834357 PI: Anand Tripathi Critical infrastructure services over the Internet are subject to constantly increasing threats posed by attackers. The goal of this project is to investigate a system architecture for building highly available Internet services using the mobile agent paradigm. In this research, mobile agent based techniques are being investigated for replication of critical components in different domains, dynamic regeneration of service components in case of attacks and failures, and distributed mechanisms to actively monitor the components of a service in different domains. Mobile agent-based mechanisms are utilized for dynamically replicating, regenerating, or migrating a service from one domain to another to ensure its continued availability, cognizant of network-wide and service-level operating conditions. Mobile agent based techniques are also used for detection and notification of critical conditions -- such as failures, intrusions, and overload conditions -- across different network domains for building resilient services over the Internet. A secure overlay network is used for isolating service components from clients, and for providing location-transparent access to migratory services. The overlay network also serves as a registry for storing service access policies and different communication models. Towards the broader impact, this projects aims to contribute to the research infrastructure in the form of an experimental system to serve as a testbed for building and experimenting with secure and resilient services.
