Mobile Agents in E-commerce Environments: Supporting Collaborative Activities

Abstract

E-commerce operations are frequently repetitive with a large segment suitable to computer aids and automation. Moreover, managing e-commerce collaborative activities on the Web requires knowing exactly what information to share with whom. Mobile agents become relevant candidates to assist users as it is largely accepted that have the ability to address efficiently some of these problems. However, mobile agent technology carries with it associated security vulnerabilities that had to be addressed in order to be functional. A key requirement is to find a flexible, convenient and effective method to work out the mobile agent authorization problem. We argue that a satisfactory approach for this problem is to dynamically map casual users, like mobile agents, with predefined organizational security roles, based on a flexible role-assignment mechanism.