Secure Resolution of End-Host Identifiers for Mobile Clients

Many efforts of the network research community focus on the introduction of a new identifier to relieve the IP address from its dual role of end-host identifier and routable locator. This identifier-locator split introduces a new identifier between human readable domain names and routable IP addresses. Mapping between identifiers and locators requires additional name mapping mechanisms because their relation is not trivial. Despite its popularity and efficiency, the DNS system is not a perfect choice for performing this mapping because identifiers are not hierarchically structured and mappings are frequently updated by users. In this paper we discuss the features needed to resolve flat identifiers to locators in a secure manner. In particular, we focus on the features and the performance that identifier-locator split protocols require from a mapping system. To this end, we consider a mapping system for an identifier-locator split based mobility solution and evaluate its performance.