Beyond HIP: The End to Hacking As We Know It

• Authors: Richard H. Paine
• Venue: Beyond HIP: The End to Hacking As We Know It
• Year: 2009

The Internet is the result of the success of a simple protocol that was developed in the 1960s and1970s by a few researchers working to develop an indestructible communications protocol concept.The enormous growth of the concept has made the Internet the foundation of a revolution of technologyand culture that will form the next hundred years of life on the planet earth. There is evenconjecture by Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet, that this will be the foundation of theinterplanetary network. The failings of this astounding revolution can be traced back to severalmisconceptions in the early days of development. One misconception was that the addressing andlocating schemes would primarily be applied to stationary and immobile computer systems. Anothermisconception is that the IP address could be used as both an address (locator) and an identityat the same time. Vint Cerf has stated; the additional header overhead did not seem necessary.Bob Moskowitz and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) set out to resolve these failings byenvisioning a protocol that would separate the locator and the identity so the underlying vulnerabilityis addressed. The result was the Host Identity Protocol (HIP). The Host Identity Protocol bookhas been written by Andrei Gurtov and gives an excellent protocol specifi cation overview. ImplementingHIP, however, requires infrastructure and process to deliver the HIP protocol. The OpenGroup, a Fortune 500 standards defining group, developed an implementable architecture with theinfrastructure to deliver HIP security to mobile devices and platforms. The architecture was namedthe Secure Mobile Architecture (SMA) and includes HIP as one of the underlying architecturalcomponents. The architecture uses the following infrastructure components to deliver end-to-endsecurity for Intranets and the Internet:Host Identity Protocol (HIP)Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)Secure DatastoreLocationSMA was developed as an open standards, open source deployment architecture at The BoeingCompany, the aircraft manufacturer. The architecture and its components are in production on themoving production lines of The Boeing Company in Everett, Wa and is in development to be usedon aircraft world-wide for secure operational TCP/IP-based communications over the Internet.The architecture works for securing mobile industrial and operations requirements, as was proven bythe Boeing implementation. This book addresses the implications of SMA for the Internet at large;it can eliminate Internet hacking as we know it. Using HIP/SMA, the packets on the public Internetare secure and have cryptographic identities onboard the packets as they traverse the Internet. HIP/SMA protects against public Internet attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS), Man-In-The-Middle(MITM), spoofi ng, and phishing. HIP/SMA delivers the legal basis for establishing the Internet asthe secure premier identity-based personal, business, and government tool for the worldwide and interplanetary Internet.