One of the main problems with IP has been its lack of security. Although IPSec and DNSSec have provided some level of security to IP, the notion of a true identity for hosts is still missing. Typically, the IP address of the host has been used as the host identity, regardless of the fact that it is nothing more than routing information. The purpose of the Host Identity Payload/Protocol (HIP) architecture is to add a cryptographically based name space, the Host Identity, to the IP protocol. The Host Identity serves as the identity of the host, whereas the IP address is merely used for routing purposes. In this paper, we describe the HIP architecture further, and present our IPv6 based implementation of HIP for Linux.

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