The paradigm of mobile agents offers a powerful and flexible opportunity to 
develop distributed applications on a high-level of abstraction. One of the 
most interesting tasks for mobile agents is an active search for relevant 
information in non-local domains on behalf of their users. A mobile agent will 
be sent out on behalf of a user to various host servers in the Internet and to 
find information. In the future this information might not be freely 
accessible, so the agent may have to pay for them. Thus the mobile agent has 
to be equipped with electronic commerce capabilities. This implies a fault 
tolerant and secure infrastructure for the mobile agent. In this paper we 
present a system which offers electronic commerce capabilities for mobile 
agents. These capabilities a part of an architecture which guarantees 
different security issues and fault tolerance for mobile agents. Security for 
the partners involved is handled by encryption methods based on a public key 
authentication mechanism and by secret key encryption of the communication. To 
achieve fault tolerance for the agent system, especially for the agent 
transfer to a new host, we use Distributed Transaction Processing (DTP). This 
architecture can be used on top of existing mobile agent systems, e.g. as an 
enhancement of the "GO-Statement", and offers a high reliability 
because the implementation is based on standardized components.