Partial group session key agreement scheme for mobile agents in e-Commerce environment

In this paper, we consider an e-Commerce system that supports buying and selling goods or services over the Internet using Mobile Agent(MA) technologies. MAs are active, autonomous, and self-replicable software objects containing both computational logic and state information. When MA technologies are applied to e-Commerce environments, the MAs can search for a product on behalf of the buyer. The buyer constructs a group of MAs, and dispatches each agent in the group to the supplier sites. Each buyer agent compares price information of goods which are suggested by the suppliers. Eventually, all MAs exchange their price information cooperating to determine the most suitable item. In the selection process, if the price information which is exchanged among the MAs is modified by malicious entities, the user may not select intended goods. In this paper, we propose a group session key generation scheme called PGKA(Partial Group session Key Agreement) for secure communication among the MAs. The PGKA has no sponsors, controllers, or any other members charged with special duties. The main idea in PGKA is to distribute the computation of the group session key generation among the members, which makes the scheme suitable for fully distributed environments. In addition, the cost of the key reconstruction is very low in this scheme, because only the seed value is required to be transmitted for the reconstruction process.