Friends or Rivals: Insights from Integrating HIP and i3

The Host Identity Protocol (HIP) uses cryptographic host identities to provide secure and efficient end-to-end communication without requiring a distributed key authority. However, HIP hosts can be vulnerable to DoS attacks and require some infrastructure to support simultaneous mobility of end points. The Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3) overlay network can be used to provide these desirable properties for HIP control packets. However, with the introduction of network shortcuts in i3 where two hosts can communicate directly, a question arises as to whether i3 can completely replace HIP. Is the end-to-end security provided by HIP a strong enough benefit compared to using shortcuts in i3? Is it worthwhile to consider using a general Distributed Object Location and Routing (DOLR) or Distributed Hash Table (DHT), such as Tapestry or Chord, instead of i3 as a control plane for HIP? We discuss these questions in the paper. We also present implementation experiences with HIP-i3 integration and show initial performance results comparing the throughput of i3 and HIP.