About

Virtual Private LAN Services are common place in modern networking. This repository contains implementation of VPLS based on Host Identity Protocol.

Introduction

Host Identity Protocol, or HIP, is layer 3.5 solution, which was initially designed to split the dual role of the IP address: locator and identifier. Using HIP protocol one can solve not only mobility problems, but also establish authenticated secure channel. This repository contains simple implementation of HIP-VPLS.

At the moment the development is ongoing. Linux was selected as a target system and all the development currently done for this operating system.

We are going to test the implementation using Mininet simulation environment.

Usage

At the moment the setup is simple. We have four routers, which form the HIP VPLS and five switches connecting hosts and routers. There are also four hosts that are agnostic about the topology used.

First clone the repository:

$ cd ~
$ git clone https://github.com/strangebit-io/hip-vpls.git

After this step is done you can deploy the topology:

$ cd hip-vpls
$ sudo bash deploy.sh

The script should install Mininet and start the topology if it does not run the following command to start the topology:

$ cd ~
$ cd hip-vpls
$ sudo python3 hipls-mn.py

Base exchange should complete its execution in a few seconds.

Once BEX is done, you should be able to ping h2 from h1 as follows (from the mininet):

mininet> h1 ping h2

You can view the progress of the BEX and other interaction in the logs:

$ tail -f router1/hipls.log

Other useful commands:

View ports' statuses

mininet> s4 ovs-ofctl show "s4"

Capture the packets between HIP switches:

minenet > r2 tcpdump -n -i r2-eth1 -w ipsec.pcap