Subject: [Hipsec] Paper: Adoption barriers of HIP

From: Levä Tapio <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:39:03 +0000

Hi all,

I would like to inform you about a paper titled as "Adoption barriers of
network layer protocols: The case of host identity protocol" that was
recently published in the Elsevier Computer Networks journal. The paper
was authored by Tapio Levä, Miika Komu, Ari Keränen and Sakari Luukkainen
and many people in the HIP (and the IETF) community were interviewed for
the paper in the summer of 2011.

Moreover, we gave presentations on the topic in multiple HIPRG meetings:
- IETF80: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/80/slides/HIPRG-6.pdf
- IETF81: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/81/slides/HIPRG-5.pdf
- IETF82: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/82/slides/HIPRG-5.pdf

The paper is available online on
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2012.11.024. In case you do not have
access to the journal but are interested reading the paper, please contact
me by email.

Abstract of the paper:
With increasing societal dependence on the Internet and new application
areas emerging, the need for securing communications and identifying
communication partners is expected to increase. However, the original
Internet architecture is lacking these functionalities, and most of the
protocols proposed to fix these issues have not been widely deployed.
Often one of the reasons for such failure is that protocol designers have
insufficient understanding of the potential adopters¹ economic incentives
so one may end up designing protocols based on false or inaccurate
assumptions. In this paper, we analyze the Host Identity Protocol (HIP)
from this viewpoint. Based on 19 expert interviews, we identify six main
reasons why HIP has not been widely deployed yet. Most importantly, (1)
the demand for the functionalities of HIP has been low. Where demand would
have existed, substitute solutions have been favored because (2) they were
earlier on the market, (3) they have relative advantage due to some design
choices of HIP, (4) HIP lacks early adopter benefits necessitating costly
coordination among multiple stakeholders in public deployment scenarios,
and (5) people have misconceptions about the deployability of HIP.
Additionally, (6) the research-mindedness of HIP developers has lead to
strategic mistakes and non-optimal design choices from the perspective of
deployment. We also suggest strategies that HIP developers could take to
foster the adoption of HIP. Besides providing value to HIP developers, the
results propose some new adoption barriers and deployment strategies that
could be taken into account when designing new protocols. Finally, the
article also provides a template that could be followed when studying the
feasibility of other protocols.

Best regards,

-- 
Tapio Levä
Doctoral student
Network Economics Research Group
Department of Communications and Networking
Aalto University
[email-masked]
+358-50-5710073
http://www.leva.fi/