Developing a Secured Mobile-Agent-Based Electronic Commerce Using Crypto-Steganography

Mobile agent is gaining attention in the research community because of its potential to replace traditional client-Server application in computer network system. Mobile agent has the ability to migrate autonomously from one server to another server as specified in its itinerary in computer network. Areas where mobile agent profit includes network management, information retrieval and electronic commerce. Mobile agent can be delegated to carry out all stages that are involved in electronic commerce such as Product brokering, Merchant brokering, Negotiation and Purchase. However there are security vulnerability issues with mobile agent system such as the need to ensure confidentiality of information of the agent from malicious parties, integrity of the data of the agent and non-repudiation from parties involves in the transactions. Security measure by agent developers has been mobile cryptography. This research combines Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and Steganography known as crypto-steganography to secure its agent. The agent was developed using PHP 5.0, Javascript, HTML, Wampserver and MySQL. The system was tested on a local area network with six computer systems, one of the computers represent client and the other five as servers. Performance evaluation was carried out to test for execution time and workload effect on the system. The result was compared with the existing secured agent-based electronic commerce systems in term of response time. The result shows that the proposed security is faster than RSA but a little slower than ECC only. A trade off was observed between a more secured system and response time of the system.