Network Working Group                                       T. Henderson
Internet-Draft                                        The Boeing Company
Expires: August 28, 2006                                     P. Nikander
                                            Ericsson Research NomadicLab
                                                       February 24, 2006


                   Using HIP with Legacy Applications
                  draft-henderson-hip-applications-02

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Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2006).

Abstract

   The Host Identity Protocol and architecture (HIP) proposes to add a
   cryptographic name space for network stack names.  From an
   application viewpoint, HIP-enabled systems support a new address
   family (e.g., AF_HOST), but it may be a long time until such HIP-
   aware applications are widely deployed even if host systems are
   upgraded.  This informational document discusses implementation and
   API issues relating to using HIP in situations in which the system is



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   HIP-aware but the applications are not.


Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   2.  Terminology  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   3.  Approaches for supporting legacy applications  . . . . . . . .  5
     3.1.  Using IP addresses in applications . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
     3.2.  Using DNS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
     3.3.  Connecting directly to a HIT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
   4.  Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
   5.  References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
   Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
   Intellectual Property and Copyright Statements . . . . . . . . . . 12




































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1.  Introduction

   The Host Identity Protocol (HIP) [1] is an experimental effort in the
   IETF and IRTF to study a new public-key-based name space for use as
   host identifiers in Internet protocols.  Fully deployed, the HIP
   architecture will permit applications to explicitly request the
   system to connect to another named host by expressing a location-
   independent name of the host when the system call to connect is
   performed.  However, there will be a transition period during which
   systems become HIP-enabled but applications are not.

   When applications and systems are both HIP-aware, the coordination
   between the application and the system can be straightforward.  For
   example, using the terminology of the widely used sockets API, the
   application can issue a system call to connect to another host by
   naming it explicitly, and the system can perform the necessary name-
   to-address mapping to assign appropriate routable addresses to the
   packets.  To enable this, a new address family (e.g., AF_HOST) could
   be defined, and additional API extensions could be defined (such as
   allowing IP addresses to be passed in the system call, along with the
   host name, as hints of where to initially try to reach the host).

   This note does not define a native HIP API such as described above.
   Rather, this note is concerned with the scenario in which the
   application is not HIP-aware and a traditional IP-address-based API
   is used by the application.  To use HIP in such a situation, there
   are a few basic possibilities: i) allow applications to use IP
   addresses as before, and provide a mapping from IP address to host
   identity (and back to IP address) within the system, ii) take
   advantage of domain name resolution to provide the application with
   either an alias for the host identifier or (in the case of IPv6) the
   host identity tag (HIT) itself, and iii) support the use of HITs
   directly (without prior DNS resolution) in place of IPv6 addresses.
   This note describes several variations of the above strategies and
   suggests some pros and cons to each approach.

   When HITs are used (rather than IP addresses) as peer names at the
   system API, they can provide a type of "channel binding" (Section
   1.1.6 of [2]) in that the ESP association formed by HIP is
   cryptographically bound to the name (HIT) invoked by the calling
   application.










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2.  Terminology


   Host Identity Tag: A 128-bit quantity formed by the hash of a Host
      Identity.  More details are available in [1].


   Local Scope Identifier: A 32- or 128-bit quantity locally
      representing the Host Identity at the IPv4 or IPv6 API.


   Referral:  An event when the application passes what it believes to
      be an IP address to another application instance on another host,
      within its application data stream.  An example is the FTP PORT
      command.


   Resolver: The system function used by applications to resolve domain
      names to IP addresses.
































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3.  Approaches for supporting legacy applications

   This section provides examples of how legacy applications, using
   legacy APIs, can operate over a HIP-enabled system and use HIP.  The
   examples are organized by the name used by an application (or
   application user) to name the peer system: an IP address, a domain
   name, or a HIT.

   While the text below concentrates on the use of the connect system
   call, the same argumentation can be applied to the unconnected
   (datagram based) system calls, too.

3.1.  Using IP addresses in applications

   Consider the case in which an application issues a "connect(ip)"
   system call to connect to a system named by address "ip", but for
   which we would like to enable HIP to protect the communications.
   Since the application or user does not (can not) indicate a desire to
   use HIP through the standard sockets API, the decision to invoke HIP
   must be done on the basis of host policy.  For example, if an IPsec-
   like implementation of HIP is being used, a policy may be entered
   into the security policy database that mandates to use or try HIP
   based on a match on the source or destination IP address, or other
   factors.

   There are a number of ways that HIP could be used in such a scenario.


   Manual configuration:

      Pre-existing SAs may be available due to previous administrative
      action.


   Opportunistically:

      The system could send an I1 to the Responder with an empty value
      for Responder HIT.


   Using DNS:

      If the responder has host identities registered in the forward DNS
      zone and has a PTR record in the reverse zone, the initiating
      system could perform a reverse+forward lookup to learn the HIT
      associated with the address.  Alternatively, the HIT could be
      stored in the reverse DNS map.  However, compared to the
      opportunistic use, there is no benefit of storing the HIT into the



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      reverse DNS map unless the reverse map is secured with DNSSEC.

   These types of solutions have the benefit of naturally supporting
   application-level referrals, since the applications always use IP
   addresses.  They have weaker security properties than the approaches
   outlined in Section 3.2 and Section 3.3, however, because the binding
   between host identity and address is weak and not visible to the
   application or user.  In fact, the semantics of the application's
   "connect(ip)" call may be interpreted as "connect me to the system
   reachable at IP address ip" but perhaps no stronger semantics than
   that.  HIP can be used in this case to provide perfect forward
   secrecy and authentication, but not to strongly authenticate the peer
   at the onset of communications.  DNS with DNSSEC, if trusted, may be
   able to provide some additional initial authentication, but at a cost
   of initial resolution latency.

   Using IP addresses at the application layer may not provide the full
   potential benefits of HIP mobility support.  It allows for mobility
   if one is able to readdress the existing sockets upon a HIP readdress
   event.  However, mobility will break in the connectionless case when
   an application caches the IP address and repeatedly calls sendto().

3.2.  Using DNS

   In the previous section, it was pointed out that a HIP-enabled system
   might make use of DNS to transparently fetch host identifiers prior
   to the onset of communication.  For applications that make use of
   DNS, the name resolution process is another opportunity to use HIP.
   If host identities are bound to domain names (with a trusted DNS) the
   following are possible:


   Return HIP LSIs instead of IP addresses:

      The system resolver could be configured to return a Local Scope
      Identifier (LSI) rather than an IP address, if HIP information is
      available in the DNS that binds a particular domain name to a host
      identity, and otherwise to return an IP address as usual.  The
      system can then maintain a mapping between LSI and host identity
      and perform the appropriate conversion at the system call
      interface or below.  The application uses the LSI as it would an
      IP address.


   Locally use a HIP-specific domain name suffix:






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      One drawback to spoofing the DNS resolution is that some
      applications actually may want to fetch IP addresses (e.g.,
      diagnostic applications such as ping).  One way to provide finer
      granularity on whether the resolver returns an IP address or an
      LSI is to distinguish by the presence of a domain name suffix.
      Specifically, if the application requests to resolve
      "www.example.com.hip" (or some similar suffix), then the system
      returns an LSI, while if the application requests to resolve
      "www.example.com", IP address(es) are returned as usual.  Caution
      against the use of FQDN suffixes is discussed in [3].

   If the LSI is non-routable, a couple of potential hazards arise.
   First, applications that perform referrals may pass the LSI to
   another system that has no system context to resolve the LSI back to
   a host identity or an IP address.  Note that these are the same type
   of applications that will likely break if used over certain types of
   NATs.  Second, applications may cache the results of DNS queries for
   a long time, and it may be hard for a HIP system to determine when to
   perform garbage collection on the LSI bindings.

   It may be possible for an LSI to be routable, but such a case may not
   have the level of security in the binding to host identity that a HIT
   has with the host identity.  For example, a special IP address that
   has some location invariance is the identifier-address discussed in
   [4].  In general, LSIs considered to date for HIP have been non-
   routable.

3.3.  Connecting directly to a HIT

   The previous two sections describe the use of IP addresses and and
   LSIs as "handles" to a host identity.  A third approach, for IPv6
   applications, is to configure the application to connect directly to
   a HIT (e.g., "connect(HIT)" as a socket call).  Although more
   cumbersome for human users (due to the flat HIT name space) than
   using either IPv6 addresses or domain names, this scenario has
   stronger security semantics, because the application is asking the
   system to connect specifically to the named peer system.

   It may be hard in this case for a system to distinguish between a HIT
   and a routable IPv6 address.  Elsewhere it has been proposed [5] that
   HITs be precluded (temporarily) from using highest-ordered bits that
   correspond to IPv6 addresses, so that at least in the near term, a
   system could differentiate between a HIT and an IPv6 address by
   inspection.

   Another challenge with this approach is in actually finding the IP
   addresses to use, based on the HIT.  Some type of HIT resolution
   service would be needed in this case.



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   A third challenge of this approach is in supporting referrals to
   possibly non-HIP-aware hosts.  However, since most communications in
   this case would likely be to other HIP-aware hosts (else the initial
   connect() would fail), the problem may be instead if the peer host
   supports HIP but is not able to perform HIT resolution for some
   reason.













































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4.  Security Considerations

   In this section we discuss the security of the system in general
   terms, outlining some of the security properties.  However, this
   section is not intended to provide a complete risk analysis.  Such an
   analysis would, in any case, be dependent on the actual application
   using HIP, and is therefore considered out of scope.

   The three outlined scenarios differ considerably in their security
   properties.  There are further differences related to whether DNSSEC
   is used or not, and whether the DNSSEC zones are considered
   trustworthy enough from an application point of view.

   When IP addresses are used to represent the peer system, the security
   properties depend on the the configuration method.  With manual
   configuration, the system's security is comparable to a non-HIP
   system with similar IPsec policies.  The security semantics of an
   opportunistic key exchange are roughly equal to current non-secured
   IP; the exchange is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
   However, the system is less vulnerable to connection hijacking
   attacks.  If the DNS is used, if both maps are secured (or the HITs
   stored in the reverse MAP) and the client trusts the DNSSEC
   signatures, the system may provide a fairly high security level.
   However, much depends on the details of the implementation, the
   security and administrative practises used when signing the DNS
   zones, and other factors.

   Using the forward DNS to map a DNS name into an LSI is a case that is
   closest to the most typical use scenarios today.  If DNSSEC is used,
   the result is fairly similar to the current use of certificates with
   TLS.  If DNSSEC is not used, the result is fairly similar to the
   current use of plain IP, with the exception that HIP provides
   protection against connection hijacking attacks.

   If the application is basing its operations on HITs, the connections
   become automatically secured due to the implicit channel bindings in
   HIP.  That is, when the application makes a connect(HIT) system call,
   the resulting connection will either be connected to a node
   possessing the corresponding private key or the connection attempt
   will fail.

5.  References

   [1]  Moskowitz, R., "Host Identity Protocol", draft-ietf-hip-base-04
        (work in progress), October 2005.

   [2]  Linn, J., "Generic Security Service Application Program
        Interface Version 2, Update 1", RFC 2743, January 2000.



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   [3]  Faltstrom, P., "Design Choices When Expanding DNS",
        draft-iab-dns-choices-03 (work in progress), February 2006.

   [4]  Bagnulo, M. and E. Nordmark, "Level 3 multihoming shim
        protocol", draft-ietf-shim6-proto-03 (work in progress),
        December 2005.

   [5]  Nikander, P., Laganier, J., and F. Dupont, "An IPv6 Prefix for
        Overlay Routable Keyed Hash Identifiers (KHI)",
        draft-laganier-ipv6-khi-01 (work in progress), February 2006.









































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Authors' Addresses

   Tom Henderson
   The Boeing Company
   P.O. Box 3707
   Seattle, WA
   USA

   Email: thomas.r.henderson@boeing.com


   Pekka Nikander
   Ericsson Research NomadicLab
   JORVAS  FIN-02420
   FINLAND

   Phone: +358 9 299 1
   Email: pekka.nikander@nomadiclab.com

































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