RE: HIP BOF Review

["Charlie Kaufman" <charliek@microsoft.com>]

I have a slightly different view of what HIP is trying to do.

I agree that what they are looking for is for HIP to become standards
track, and that this experimental proposal is a ploy to get a working
group chartered with less scrutiny than would otherwise take place. I
believe we should let that ploy succeed, but make sure they get the
scrutiny before charter extensions are approved.

My (perhaps rude) summary of HIP is that they are proposing simple
limited solutions to the Mobile IP problem, the end to end security
through encryption problem, the IPv4 to IPv6 migration problem, and
probably some others. All of those problems are being addressed by other
working groups, but none of the proposed solutions has been widely
deployed after years of work. If they were all deployed, HIP would be
unnecessary. If HIP were deployed, all of these would lose momentum
because the need for them would be less urgent. HIP, then, represents a
threat to all of these efforts.

My belief is that the HIP effort will fail for a combination of
political and technical reasons. Technically because their proposal is
complex enough and their committee large enough that it may collapse of
its own weight. Politically because all of the competing efforts are
likely to try to "help"
and in doing so add to the technical complexity. My knee jerk reaction,
for example, is to try to get them to replace their key exchange
protocol with IKEv2, which is substantially more complex and not yet
deployed, but it's *my* protocol and it probably has some advantages
over theirs.

That said, I think they should be allowed to proceed. I believe the
community will benefit because they raise questions as to whether the
proposed complexity in the competing protocols is really necessary. That
forced review is likely to help. More importantly, I believe trying to
block the effort would be perceived as trying to block innovation and
protect the incumbent efforts and their attendant complexity. Finally,
because I might be wrong, they might pull this off, and the result might
get us solutions to these problems years sooner than our current path.

	--Charlie