| The High Assurance Internet Protocol Encryptor (HAIPE) is a critical component of the Global Information Grid (GIG) that will enable secure communications to support Information Assurance (IA) in the evolving network-centric architecture for the Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community networks. HAIPEs will generate additional control traffic and introduce delay as information packets traverse the GIG between a source and destination. In addition, HAIPEs interrupt the end-to-end routing architecture, and their deployment impacts network’s scalability. Therefore, the deployment of HAIPEs in the GIG must be carefully analyzed to determine their impact on performance of the GIG traffic on an end-to-end basis. The complexities of the HAIPE impacts include discovery of the terminating HAIPE for a given destination plain-text (PT) address, performance and features of routing protocols, and impact of encryption and decryption by terminating HAIPEs. These impacts are being identified analytically in the GIG architecture and routing work. However, Modeling and Simulation are generally required to confirm or refine the analysis, since analytical techniques cannot be applied effectively to such complex problems.
We are in the process of developing a HAIPE model, including a HAIPE discovery approach proposed by the GIG Routing Working Group (GRWG), to address the impact of HAIPE overhead on the performance and scalability of a network such as the GIG. The purpose of this paper is to describe our HAIPE model, to present the operation of the HAIPE-related protocols including HAIPE discovery, and to report on results that will be used to quantify the impact of HAIPEs in a network environment such as the GIG. |