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The increasing dimension and heterogeneity of global Web systems make their management with tools based on the client/server model more difficult. The mobile agent technology overcomes the limits of traditional approaches and proposes solutions that are suitable for the management of distributed and heterogeneous Internet‐based systems. The paper describes the MAMAS environment and its implementation with a mobile agent technology. MAMAS has the goals of monitoring the whole system, introducing dynamic corrective actions and modifying system policies at run‐time. MAMAS achieves these objectives by answering the guidelines of both security and compliance to standards. The choice of Java as the implementation language has made it possible to achieve portability, to exploit the language security features, and to provide Web accessibility. The MAMAS compliance with CORBA ensures interoperability with legacy management platforms.

The Internet is an open and global programming environment where applications and services mostly follow the traditional client/server model. The use of new programming paradigms based on mobile entities, such as mobile agents (MA), can accelerate the process of diffusion of new applications and services in the areas of e‐commerce, network and systems management, and mobile computing. However, the lack of security is one of the main obstacles to a wide diffusion of MA. On the one hand, mobility increases the potential of security breaches because of the injection of possibly malicious MAs; on the other hand, it introduces the new issue of protecting MAs against integrity and secrecy attacks from their execution environments. This paper discusses the security issues introduced by the MA technology and proposes a security architecture composed of a wide set of services and components, which adequately fulfil the requirements of several application areas. The implementation of the security framework in the secure and open MA system has provided the support for the development of a secure electronic marketplace prototype that demonstrates the effectiveness of adopting the MA technology in the Internet environment.