[noise] Comments on the specification

[Rhys Weatherley]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 5:35 AM, Trevor Perrin <trevp at trevp.net> wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 5:25 PM, Rhys Weatherley
> <rhys.weatherley at gmail.com> wrote:
> > A few minor comments as I've been working on Noise-C.
>
> Hi Rhys,
>
> Nice start on the C lib, good name.
>
> Definitely send any feedback or unclear parts you find in the spec,
> feedback from implementers is gold at this point.
>

I got a little confused with the description of handshake patterns vs
message patterns in 5.3. Handshake State.  It got clearer on the third
reading:

- A handshake pattern (e.g. XX) maps to a sequence of message patterns, one
for each handshake packet that is exchanged.
- Each message pattern is a sequence of tokens indicating what to do in the
current handshake packet.

The information is there but my eyes missed it on the first two readings.
The two different meanings of "pattern" got confused in my brain and I kept
thinking I was looking at the other one.  Not sure how to clarify.
"Message template" instead of "message pattern" perhaps?  Patterns ->
templates -> tokens.  Different words at each level.

In section 9.2 in the description of Noise Pipes there is a change over
from using "..." to "-----" as a separator in the pattern definitions.  Are
they the same thing, or something different?  The diagrams aren't clear as
to where the fallback happens.  The text indicates that the responder
rejects the first IK message and then sends something else with a different
packet type.  It may help if there were two diagrams for the whole sequence
from the start, Noise_IK, and Noise_IK_to_XXfallback.  They will both have
the same prefix, but with a comment saying "if failure happens here, switch
to the other pattern and continue".

Cheers,

Rhys.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/noise/attachments/20160411/1e8adcee/attachment.html>