Welcome to HIP!
The Host Identity Payload Homepage
What is HIP?
HIP started out in December 1998, as a lightweight alternative to
IKE.
During the course of its development, the Host Identity (HI) and
Tag (HIT) as a secure, provable Endpoint Identity (EID) became of
greater value than just another way to manage the keys for a VPN.
Today, with the emergence of Identity Oriented Networking (ION),
HIP can best be discribed as
A Protocol to securely manage the context between two securely
named Identities.
This context is called a Security Association (SA) and is itself
identified by a pair of uni-directional Security Parameter Indexes
(SPI).
HIP thus enables two peers to maintain communications bound to
their respective HITs. This communication path can support a
single pair of applications or can be multiplexed with a middle
layer to allow multiple applications to share the same SA.
How is HIP used today?
HIPv2 is
an IETF Proposed Standard. Its primary use is to manage an
IP-level VPN tunnel using ESP.
There are two open implementations of HIP:
HIP has also been used, commerically by Tempered Networks, to
manage a Virtual Network as defined in
HIP VPLS.
Still, HIP remains a nitch protocol with barriers to deployment researched.
New HIP Work
There are two new directions for HIP, both leveraging HIP as an
identity management protocol.
The first focuses on defining a Session Services model and how HIP
can manage the Session context. The drafts for this are:
draft-hares-i2nsf-ssls
<-- In serious need of an update.
draft-moskowitz-ssls-hip
draft-moskowitz-sse
draft-moskowitz-gpcomp
The second focuses on enhancements to HIP to meet the needs of 5G
mobility. The drafts for this are:
draft-moskowitz-hip-based-5gpp-ip-mobility
draft-moskowitz-hierarchical-hip
draft-moskowitz-hip-fast-mobility
draft-moskowitz-hip-IPnHIP
draft-moskowitz-gpcomp
HIP Documents
The first HIP draft is:
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-moskowitz-hip-00.txt
The best place to find the list of HIP RFCs and current work is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/hip/documents/
A good article on HIP:
A. Gurtov, M. Komu, R. Moskowitz, Host Identity Protocol (HIP):
Identifier/Locator Split for Host Mobility and Multihoming,
Internet Protocol Journal, 12(1):27-32, March 2009.
© Robert G. Moskowitz -- 2017