Patent attributes
The present description refers to a method for securing processing of an order by a mobile agent from a first server (So) within a network system with a plurality of servers (So, S1, . . . ,Sn), at least a number of which the mobile agent has to pass according to an appropriate succession, wherein each of the plurality of servers has a pair of a public key (KSo, . . . ,KSi, . . . , KSn) and a private key (PKSo, . . . ,PKSi, . . . , PKSn) associated therewith, respectively, the method comprising, starting from any one of the number of servers the mobile agent has to pass, called herein the i'th server at least the steps of receiving the mobile agent which has been prepared by the first server by choosing a unique number (r0) and assigning it to the mobile agent, encoding the chosen unique number (r0) with the private key (PKSo) of the first server (So), thus forming an agent specific initialisation number (Co) as basis for a sequence of checksums (Co, . . . ,Ci, . . . ,Cn) to be computed successively by the number of servers (So, S1, . . ., Sn), sending the mobile agent together with its initialisation number (Co) on its route through the network system for processing the order passing thereby the number of servers (So, S1, . . . ,Sn) successively, and initiating each server (S1, . . . ,Sn) from which the mobile agent intends to take data with it when passing that server to encode the initialisation number (Co) together with the data with the respective server's private key (PKS1, . . . ,PKSi, . . . , PKSn) and to compute therewith a new server specific checksum (C1, . . . ,Ci, . . . ,Cn) using the public key (KSo) of the first server (So) and the checksum (Co, . . . ,Ci, . . . ,Cn−1) computed by the server (So, . . . ,Sn−1) right before in the succession.