What is the purpose of Noise Protocol in Aeternity Threat Model?

Hi All,

I could find reference to a cryptographic technique known as Noise protocol in the Aeternity GitHub repository in the section on threat model.

It seems to be referring to ChaChaPoly ciphers. Could you please explain how is it used in Aeternity ?

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The noise protocol is used to encrypt traffic between peers for sync and state channel communication. The actual implementation is enoise.

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Hey @gokulalex,

Thomas Arts described æternity’s security components during æternity Universe One conference.

Watch here:

Best,
Albena

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Thank you @botanicalcarebot.chain for sharing the summary of noise protocol. From a first impression, e-noise implementation seems to be an encrypted protocol over TCP. Is it only encryption or is it also doing some kind of compression. Does it encrypt message propagation between peers and state channels. Is it an alternative to gossip protocol, unicast and multi-cast protocols.

noise doesn’t do compression, it is merely focused on transport level encryption.

It also doesn’t concern the topology of communication.

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Hi @botanicalcarebot.chain thank you for the succinct and insightful response. I am a little intrigued by the term topology of communication. Does noise work seamlessly with UDP ? Will it be impacted by the transition to HTTP/3. The emerging QUIC protocol is on the top of UDP instead of TCP.

Noise does work over UDP as well, although you’d have to take care of message re-ordering in that case. HTTP is on a layer (7) above all of that and is in general not connected to noise, since it uses TLS 1.3 .