RFC 1022 (rfc1022) - Page 1 of 12

High-level Entity Management Protocol (HEMP)

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Network Working Group                                      C. Partridge
Request For Comment: 1022                                      BBN/NNSC
                                                             G. Trewitt
                                                               Stanford
                                                           October 1987

          THE HIGH-LEVEL ENTITY MANAGEMENT PROTOCOL (HEMP)

STATUS OF THIS MEMO

   An application protocol for managing network entities such as hosts,
   gateways and front-end machines, is presented.  This protocol is a
   component of the High-Level Entity Management System (HEMS) described
   in RFC-1021.  Readers may want to consult RFC-1021 when reading this
   memo.  This memo also assumes a knowledge of the ISO data encoding
   standard, ASN.1.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

PROTOCOL OVERVIEW

   The High-Level Entity Management Protocol (HEMP) provides an
   encapsulation system and set of services for communications between
   applications and managed entities.  HEMP is an application protocol
   which relies on existing transport protocols to deliver HEMP messages
   to their destination(s).

   The protocol is targeted for management interactions between
   applications and entities.  The protocol is believed to be suitable
   for both monitoring and control interactions.

   HEMP provides what the authors believe are the three essential
   features of a management protocol:  (1) a standard encapsulation
   scheme for all interactions, (2) an authentication facility which can
   be used both to verify messages and limit access to managed systems,
   and (3) the ability to encrypt messages to protect sensitive
   information.  These features are discussed in detail in the following
   sections.

PROTOCOL OPERATION

   HEMP is designed to support messages; where a message is an
   arbitrarily long sequence of octets.

   Five types of messages are currently defined: request, event, reply,
   and protocol error, and application error messages.  Reply, protocol
   error and application error messages are only sent in reaction to a
   request message, and are referred to collectively as responses.





Partridge & Trewitt
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