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Electronic commerce also can take place between agents. For example, there could be an agent host dedicated to the buying and selling of automobiles. If you wanted to buy a car, you could give an agent knowledge of your preferences, including a price range and potentially a negotiation strategy. You would send your agent to the dedicated host, where it would mingle and haggle with agents seeking to sell a car.
If a potential match were found, your agent could report back to you, and you could contact each other in person to make the final arrangements. Alternatively, your agent potentially could consummate the deal on your behalf. If the opportunity is a good one, your agent may have only a few microseconds to act before someone else's agent buys the car.
Although there is no shortage of potential applications for mobile agents, the technology raises a few concerns -- probably the biggest being security. With an established infrastructure of mobile agent hosts that give agents access to local resources, virus writers and other rogue programmers could have a lot of fun.
Although host security is a prime concern, it is likely a solvable problem. Using existing security mechanisms, such as those offered by Java, it should be possible to achieve acceptable levels of security to protect hosts from malicious agents.
Another side to mobile agent security, which may not be as straightforward to solve, is protecting agents from malicious hosts. If you are planning to send out agents that have your credit card numbers or some form of e-cash embedded in their state, you need to worry about pickpockets. Because a host uploads the class files and state for your aglets, they (or anyone sniffing the network during transit) could potentially read private information or even alter your aglet's code and state.