[noise] Revision 33 draft

[Trevor Perrin]

On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 7:32 AM, David Wong <davidwong.crypto at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have no deep knowledge of Strobe, but what if we replaced the initial “Noise_” with any other arbitrary string (may it be StrobevX or whichever)?
[...]
>
> I think that's the right idea. I should probably change the Disco
> naming to "Disco_" since it should not be parsed like a "Noise_"
> protocol name.


I think of the "Noise_" prefix as indicating the Noise framework, so
changing the prefix would indicate a completely different protocol, or
a fork.

I'd rather view something like Disco as an option for symmetric-crypto
within the Noise framework.

Since Disco replaces our existing cipher and hash algorithms with
"something else", it makes sense to replace the cipher and hash names
with something else.

I think we have some reasonable proposals for naming this:

#1) Noise_XX_25519_STROBEvX_Keccak1660
#2) Noise_XX_25519_STROBEvX/Keccak1660
#3) Noise_XX_25519_(STROBEvX_Keccak1660)
#4) Noise_XX_25519_STROBEvX-Keccak1660

The simplest is #2.  Names would simply be in one of two forms:

  Noise_[PATTERN]_[DH]_[CIPHER]_[HASH]
  Noise_[PATTERN]_[DH]_[SYMMETRIC]

The downside of #2 would be if we discover a need for more "structure"
in the symmetric names than can be handled by the "/" character.  If
that happens, we could extend the format with something like #3, with
parentheses allowing both underscores and slashes within algorithm
names.

So I'll suggest that we experiment with #2 for now, but leave this out
of the spec until we gain more experience and better understand the
requirements for naming "symmetric" objects.

Trevor