HIPRG:About

From HIPRG

The Host Identity Protocol (HIP) is a proposal for adding a new name space to the TCP/IP stack. The new name space consist of Host Identifiers, which are cryptographic public keys. The HIP architecture adds a new "shim" layer between the IP layer and the transport layer, decoupling the layers from each other. This allows IP addresses to be used solely as locators and not as host identifiers. Instead of IP addresses, the applications and transport protocols use Host Identifiers to name peer hosts. More concise representations of Host Identifiers -- 128-bit Host Identity Tags (HITs) and 32-bit Local Scope Identifiers (LSIs) -- have been defined to represent host identities in IPv6- or IPv4-sized address structures, respectively, allowing most, but not all, legacy applications to work unmodified on top of HIP.

The IETF Host Identity Protocol working group has been chartered to complete the short term engineering work on HIP, including the base protocol specification, basic mobility and multi-homing, basic rendezvous service, and the basic DNS records needed to store HIP related information.

The primary goal of the HIP Research Group is to study the proposed Host Identity Protocol and architecture, including potential effects on the Internet. When indicated by its studies, the HIP RG can suggest extensions and modifications to the protocol and architecture. It is also in scope for the RG to study, in a wider sense, the consequences and effects that wide-scale adoption of any type of separation of the identifier and locator roles of IP addresses is likely to have. With regard to this latter, the research group is tasked with producing an experiment report providing input to the IETF on mechanisms for separating the identifier and locator nature of IP addresses. That is, given the assumption that some kind of identifier and locator separation should be adopted, the research group will provide an analysis on baseline architectures and mechanisms upon which standardizing such a separation could be based.

This wiki is intended as a resource for the HIP RG. See the HIP research group charter for more information.