Proxy for host identity protocol

Abstract

In computer networks, a proxy acts as an intermediary computer system or an application program which serves the requests of its clients by forwarding their packets or data flows to some servers. Host Identity Protocol (HIP) provides security extension as well as mobility on top of TCP/IP stack. However, HIP requires some changes to the networking stacks which can he considered as a deployment obstacle. A HIP proxy provides a solution which can provide a transition path towards HIP-capable networks.

In the context of this thesis, a HIP proxy translates packet flows from legacy clients to HIP-capable servers without requiring any HIP-development at the client side. The goal of this master thesis is to design and implement a prototype of a HIP proxy which supports basic protocol translation from non-HIP based communications to HIP based communications.

In this thesis, we also present a performance analysis of the implemented prototype against communications without the proxy. We also compare the design of the proxy against another and describe future work items, such as server-side HIP proxy.