[noise] Noise Explorer: Generate Software Implementations

[Nadim Kobeissi]

Hello everyone,

A central promise that I made during Real World Crypto last week [0] was
that Noise Explorer would soon support generating software implementations.
Well, I am now pleased to announce that Noise Explorer can generate
software implementations for arbitrary Noise Handshake Patterns, written in
Go [1].

As always, you may try out Noise Explorer here:
https://noiseexplorer.com/

In the rest of this email, I will answer some questions which may be of
interest to readers of this mailing list.

Q1: Why did you choose Go?
A1: I chose Go as the initial target for the following reasons:
    - Go is my favorite programming language and I think it's very
enjoyable to write software in.
    - Go allows for the production of independent executable for a very
wide variety of operating systems and architectures.
    - Go is definitely among the top languages (if not the top language)
used in network applications where Noise would be relevant.
    - Go is a relatively simple language, which makes it ideal as the
initial target for code generation.
    - An encouraging discussion occurred with Mr. Filippo Valsorda, the
maintainer of Go's crypto libraries, during which he indicated a level of
commitment to Go having a strong, maintained and modern stack of the
cryptographic primitives necessary for Noise Protocols to work.
    - Go allows for constant time cryptography, unlike for example
JavaScript, while still being safer than for example C.
    - Yes, I know that Go does not currently support erasing secrets from
memory. I wish it did.

Q2: Are future languages planned?
A2: Yes. I plan to integrate the following languages:
    - WASM: This will allow for small, portable Noise Handshake Pattern
modules to be usable within web applications. Go supports native
compilation to WASM, so I predict that this WASM code generation will be
supported soon and with minimal fuss.
    - Rust: The impressively strong type system of Rust will allow us to
reason more about the properties and constraints of certain components of a
Noise Handshake Pattern, such as for example the one-time usage of
ephemeral keys. These type checks, which may be onerous to write by hand,
will be good to generate automatically using Noise Explorer.
    - F*: Same as Rust, but even more checks as well as proofs on algebraic
matters using Z3.

Q3: Can I help integrate my own language?
A3: You should be able to but you'll need to do some tinkering. Noise
Explorer does indeed use a modular, template-based framework, but despite
my attempts to clean it up as much as possible it's still fairly
opinionated and sometimes arbitrary. You can try, and you will likely
succeed, but you will need to decipher the templates yourself. Happily,
it's not very hard to do so.

Q4: Can I use these generated implementations in production today?
A4: It appears to me that there likely exists no serious problems in
today's generated Go code. I would advise to test them out first, however,
and perhaps read the code closely, at least for the first couple of weeks.
I have tested the generated code locally for only a few days so far. It
does seem to pass the test vectors provided by Cacophony [2] but I am still
working on more tests, with the assistance of an undergraduate student who
has expressed interest in writing a full test suite for Noise
Explorer-generated implementations. So: yes, my code looks good, but no,
it's only existed for a few days and I don't know whether I can just tell
you to roll it out inside your mission-critical flying ambulance airplane
without first reading the generated code yourself.

Q5: Will these implementations be updated to support Revision 35, 36, etc.
of the Noise Protocol Framework?
Q5: Yes.

Q6: I noticed that I am constrained by these generated implementations to a
single cipher suite. Why is that?
A6: This is for no good reason. I will soon support specifying your own
cipher suites. Right now, you are constrained only
to 25519_ChaChaPoly_BLAKE2s. I chose this cipher suite because:
    - It uses very nice primitives across the board.
    - It is used by WireGuard.

Q7: Any other future plans for Noise Explorer?
A7: No. The only things I have on my plate are what was listed above:
    - WASM, Rust and F* support.
    - More comprehensive automated test suites for generated
implementations.
    - Cipher suite support.
    - Keep everything up to spec with upcoming official revisions to the
Noise Protocol Framework.
All of the above points are tracked on GitHub:
https://github.com/SymbolicSoft/noiseexplorer/issues

I hope Noise Explorer will continue to be useful to the world!

References:
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrcdDJhbPKQ
[1] https://golang.org
[2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/cacophony

Nadim Kobeissi
Symbolic Software • https://symbolic.software
Sent from office
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