We address the security issue of the data which mobile agents gather as they are traversing the Internet. Our goal is to devise a security protocol that truly secures the data which mobile agents gather. Several cryptographic protocols were presented in the literature asserting the security of gathered data. Formal verification of the protocols reveals unforeseen security flaws, such as truncation or alteration of the collected data, breaching the privacy of the gathered data, sending others data under the private key of a malicious host, and replacing the collected data with data of similar agents. So the existing protocols are not truly secure. We present an accurate security protocol which aims to assert strong integrity, authenticity, and confidentiality of the gathered data. The proposed protocol is derived from the Multi-hops protocol. The protocol suffers from security flaws, e.g. an adversary might truncate/ replace collected data, or sign others data with its own private key without being detected. The proposed protocol refines the Multi-hops protocol by implementing the following security techniques: utilization of co-operating agents, scrambling the gathered offers, requesting a visited host to clear its memory from any data acquired as a result of executing the agent before the host dispatches the agent to the succeeding host in the agent???s itinerary, and carrying out verifications on the identity of the genuine initiator at the early execution of the agent at visited hosts, in addition to the verifications upon the agent???s return to the initiator. The proposed protocol also implements the common security techniques such as public key encryption, digital signature, etc. The implemented security techniques would rectify the security flaws revealed in the existing protocols. We use STA, an infinite-state exploration tool, to verify the security properties of a reasonably small instance of the proposed protocol in key configurations. The analysis using STA reports no attack. Moreover, we carefully reason the correctness of the security protocol for a general model and show that the protocol would be capable of preventing or at least detecting the attacks revealed in the existing protocols.

We address the security issue of the data which mobile agents gather as they are traversing the Internet. Our goal is to devise a security protocol that truly secures the data which mobile agents gather. Several cryptographic protocols were presented in the literature asserting the security of gathered data. Formal verification of the protocols reveals unforeseen security flaws, such as truncation or alteration of the collected data, breaching the privacy of the gathered data, sending others data under the private key of a malicious host, and replacing the collected data with data of similar agents. So the existing protocols are not truly secure. We present an accurate security protocol which aims to assert strong integrity, authenticity, and confidentiality of the gathered data. The proposed protocol is derived from the Multi-hops protocol. The protocol suffers from security flaws, e.g. an adversary might truncate/ replace collected data, or sign others data with its own private key without being detected. The proposed protocol refines the Multi-hops protocol by implementing the following security techniques: utilization of co-operating agents, scrambling the gathered offers, requesting a visited host to clear its memory from any data acquired as a result of executing the agent before the host dispatches the agent to the succeeding host in the agent???s itinerary, and carrying out verifications on the identity of the genuine initiator at the early execution of the agent at visited hosts, in addition to the verifications upon the agent???s return to the initiator. The proposed protocol also implements the common security techniques such as public key encryption, digital signature, etc. The implemented security techniques would rectify the security flaws revealed in the existing protocols. We use STA, an infinite-state exploration tool, to verify the security properties of a reasonably small instance of the proposed protocol in key configurations. The analysis using STA reports no attack. Moreover, we carefully reason the correctness of the security protocol for a general model and show that the protocol would be capable of preventing or at least detecting the attacks revealed in the existing protocols.