Performance of Host Identity Protocol on Symbian OS

Abstract

Abstract-The Host Identity Protocol (HIP) has been specified by the IETF as a new solution for secure host mobility and multihoming in the Internet. HIP uses self-certifying publicprivate key pairs in combination with IPsec to authenticate hosts and protect user data. While there are three open-source HIP implementations, little experience is available with running HIP on lightweight hardware such as a mobile phone. Limited computational power and battery lifetime of lightweight devices raise concerns if HIP can be used there at all. This paper describes the porting process of HIP on Linux (HIPL) and OpenHIP implementations to Symbian OS, as well as performance measurements of HIP over WLAN using Nokia E51 and N80 smartphones. We found that with 1024-bit keys, the HIP base exchange with a server varies from 1.68 to 3.31 seconds depending on whether the mobile phone is in standby or active state respectively. After analyzing HIP performance in different scenarios we make conclusions and recommendations on using IP security on lightweight hardware clients.

Analysis of deployment challenges of Host Identity Protocol

“…HIP has been implemented for Linux based systems [12], Microsoft systems [13], sensor networks [14], mobile platforms [15], lightweight hardware [16], RFIDs [17], and has been used in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) [18]. The InfraHIP project was devoted to develop the infrastructure for the wide utility of HIP.…”

Resource Footprint of a Manycast Protocol Implementation on Multiple Mobile Platforms

“…A similar study to ours is performed analysing the performance of two different Host Identity Protocol (HIP) implementations in Symbian OS [12] in terms of CPU load, memory usage and power consumption but only at initialisation time.…”

Distributed user authentication in wireless LANs

“…One of our objectives was to evaluate the impact of such heavy operations on performance of our authentication architecture. Our previous work [16], [15], which studied HIP performance on Linux-based Nokia Internet Tablets and Symbian smartphones, served as a good starting point for performance evaluation in this article. In addition, HIP was evaluated on stationary Internet hosts with conventional PC-like resources [11], [10], [14], [26].…”