HIP Diet EXchange (DEX)
René Hummen, Miika Komu, Robert Moskowitz
Abstract
This document specifies the Host Identity Protocol Diet EXchange (HIP DEX), a variant of the Host Identity Protocol Version 2 (HIPv2). The HIP DEX protocol design aims at reducing the overhead of the employed cryptographic primitives by omitting public-key signatures and hash functions. In doing so, the main goal is to still deliver similar security properties to HIPv2. The HIP DEX protocol is primarily designed for computation or memory- constrained sensor/actuator devices. Like HIPv2, it is expected to be used together with a suitable security protocol such as the Encapsulated Security Payload (ESP) for the protection of upper layer protocol data. In addition, HIP DEX can also be used as a keying mechanism for security primitives at the MAC layer, e.g., for IEEE 802.15.4 networks.