[noise] Potential redesign?

[Watson Ladd]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 5:51 PM, Trevor Perrin <trevp at trevp.net> wrote:
> I'm considering a redesign of Noise, with the goal of making it a
> framework that can express a wider range of DH-based protocols.
>
> The previous Noise had a single box message, and a single pipe
> protocol.  So it wasn't optimal for every case, e.g. where clients had
> prior knowledge of server keys, or didn't want to do client
> authentication:
>
> https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/noise/2015/000109.html
>
>
> So the idea now is that Noise messages could be described with strings
> that just list a bunch of DH public keys and calculations in the order
> they should be sent / calculated, and libraries should be able to
> handle any message described by such a string (a descriptor).
>
> This needs a lot of fleshing out, but I'm curious if people like the basic idea.
>
> https://github.com/trevp/noise/blob/noise2/noise.md
>
>
<snip>

This seems to kick the protocol design and assurance question down the
road, while adding a lot of complexity (parser+interpreter) to an
implementation. Of course, there are other ways to implement
(source-to-source transformations, etc) but they are all very complex.

On the plus side, there are some similar ideas for DSLs for the
implementation of crypto protocols on top of primitives kicking
around: I don't recall offhand a specific reference. They can
potentially make translation of protocols into code much easier: write
the tool once, then use it.

Sincerely,
Watson