[noise] Noise replacements for crypto_box and crypto_secretbox

[Rhys Weatherley]

On Sun, Oct 2, 2016 at 2:35 PM, Brian Smith <brian at briansmith.org> wrote:

> Trevor brought up the good point that Noise tries to do something like
> this, and it might be good to define that things as an instance of a Noise
> protocol. However, it isn't obvious that Noise covers all the same use
> cases as crypto_box and crypto_secretbox. Also, Noise has a lot of options,
> and it isn't clear exactly which combinations of Noise options are most
> directly replacements for crypto_box and crypto_secretbox. It might be the
> case that there isn't a 1-to-1 mapping but I'm looking for a very small set
> (say 2 to 4 elements) of concrete Noise protocols that people would agree
> could serve as replacements.
>

crypto_box looks to me like the one-way Noise_K pattern with the public
keys exchanged out of band.  Noise_X could be used too.

crypto_secretbox appears to be symmetric encryption for transport-level
message security rather than public-key.  The CipherState API
post-handshake is the closest match.

I'm not too familiar with NaCl's primitives, so it may help if there was
more information.  Are these typically used on their own or as building
blocks in a larger application protocol?

Cheers,

Rhys.
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