Dynamic Firewall Configuration Using Mobile Agents

The nearly omnipresence ofthe Internet and the steady increase ofwireless computing
and mobile devices require highly dynamic adaptable distributed system architectures.
Building such architectures needs a combination ofkey concepts from component
technology and distributed systems. Mobile agents provide this combination. We use
mobile agents as the building blocks ofacomponent-based system for remote supervision
and control of both hard- and software in a distributed environment. In this paper we
concentrate on the configuration ofindividual components and component relationships
in our system. We identify requirements for remote configuration ofagent-based
component systems and discuss architectural and user interface related issues ofour
approaches. We use acode-on-demand approach for supporting elaborate user interfaces.
We use a generative approach based on enhanced meta-information for reducing
development effort. The presented approaches are applicable for remote configuration of
component-based systems in general and consider additional requirements imposed
through the use of mobile agenttechnology.