[Cryptography] Call for nomenclature...

Phillip Hallam-Baker phill at hallambaker.com
Thu Jun 13 10:58:13 EDT 2019


OK, this might sound like a trivial request but it really isn't.

As you know, I am finishing the first release of what is now the third
version of the Mesh architecture and I think I have it right this time
because I have reduced the number of moving parts drastically. The Mesh now
has three main parts:

1) An infrastructure that allows users to manage their devices by
connecting them to a personal Mesh

2) An infrastructure that allows users to exchange credentials with other
users using the trust validation criteria appropriate for the intended use.

3) An infrastructure that allows users to manage application configurations
including but not limited to managing cryptographic credentials.

This is all built on three new cryptographic primitives.

1) Uniform Data Fingerprints provide naming and addressing infrastructure.
UDFs are not URIs but can be used to construct URIs. UDFs are used to
represent cryptographic digests, nonces, keys and key shares.

2) DARE (Data At Rest Encryption) Messages: Are a JSON-ish equivalent to a
PKCS#7 wrapper with support for the meta-cryptography used in the Mesh.
UDFs are used for addressing type purposes.

3) DARE Containers: Are a sequence of DARE Messages and provide Blockchain
type functionality for authenticity with incremental encryption capability.
Containers are used as the basis for DARE Catalogs which contain sets of
items, DARE Archives which are an encrypted file archive expressed as a
DARE Catalog and DARE Spools which contain queues of tasks, messages.

The problem I have come to is that I am now using the term message as a
term of art to mean two different things in different parts of the same
system. This did not matter when the terms were defined as DARE was an
application built on top of the Mesh at that point. Now it is the platform
on which the Mesh is built. And so there is a lot of scope for confusion.

So what can I use as the name for a DARE Message?
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