Beyond HIP: The End to Hacking As We Know It

The Internet is the result of the success of a simple protocol that was developed in the 1960s and
1970s 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 technology
and culture that will form the next hundred years of life on the planet earth. There is even
conjecture by Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet, that this will be the foundation of the
interplanetary network. The failings of this astounding revolution can be traced back to several
misconceptions in the early days of development. One misconception was that the addressing and
locating schemes would primarily be applied to stationary and immobile computer systems. Another
misconception is that the IP address could be used as both an address (locator) and an identity
at 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 by
envisioning a protocol that would separate the locator and the identity so the underlying vulnerability
is addressed. The result was the Host Identity Protocol (HIP). The Host Identity Protocol book
has been written by Andrei Gurtov and gives an excellent protocol specifi cation overview. Implementing
HIP, however, requires infrastructure and process to deliver the HIP protocol. The Open
Group, a Fortune 500 standards defining group, developed an implementable architecture with the
infrastructure to deliver HIP security to mobile devices and platforms. The architecture was named
the Secure Mobile Architecture (SMA) and includes HIP as one of the underlying architectural
components. The architecture uses the following infrastructure components to deliver end-to-end
security for Intranets and the Internet:

Host Identity Protocol (HIP)
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
Secure Datastore
Location

SMA was developed as an open standards, open source deployment architecture at The Boeing
Company, the aircraft manufacturer. The architecture and its components are in production on the
moving production lines of The Boeing Company in Everett, Wa and is in development to be used
on 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 by
the 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 Internet
are 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 as
the secure premier identity-based personal, business, and government tool for the worldwide and interplanetary Internet.