This paper describes a distributed security infrastructure for mobile agents. The first property of the infrastructure is believability; this means that mechanisms are provided for authenticating information furnished by an agent. A second security property is survivability. This means that an agent computation can be programmed to survive attacks by malicious hosts on individual agents; this is achieved through encryption as well as agent replication and voting. The main feature of the

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... ucture is that mobile agents are themselves used to enforce the security properties.