Noise Plug-and-play Implementation in Golang posted November 2017

I wrote an implementation of Noise in Go. I've already talked about it here but I've made some progress towards a more usable library.

It is now a real protocol built from the Noise protocol framework!

Noise doesn't work right off-the-bat because it does not have a length field in its messages. This means that two problems can arise:

• if a noise message is fragmented, the receiver will not be able to know and will not be able to parse the received fragments
• if noise messages are received concatenated to one another, noise will interpret that as one big message and the integrity verification of the encrypted message (via GCM or Poly1305) will fail

In different words, without an indication of a length, noise cannot know where a message stops. Messages can get fragmented by middleboxes, and can get concatenated just because of latency or the way the other peer send its messages. In lab condition this might not be a problem, but in real life without a framing protocol below Noise things will fail quickly.

This is why by default, you can't implement the components of the Noise specification and expect it to work. Having said that, with this minimal addition of a length field things do work!

But that's not the only problem that the specification fails to tackle. The other problem is the authentication of static public keys.

You see, in Noise you have many different ways of doing handshakes (named Noise_XX, Noise_KN, ...), and some of them do not require one of the peer's authentication. Kind of like the typical browser ↔ webserver scenario where only the webserver will authenticate itself via a certificate (and perhaps the browser will later authenticate itself via credentials in a form). Some patterns that you should never use fail to authenticate both side (Noise_NN) and that is why I haven't implemented them. But for patterns that do authenticate one of the side (or both), problems arise: the Noise specification does not have any safeguards in its algorithms to prevent you from failing to authenticate the other side of the connection.

This means that if you implement Noise following the specification, patterns like Noise_XX where both sides require authentication will happily go through without caring about authenticating anything. This leads to trivial active man-in-the-middle attacks.

What I've done is that:

• if the pattern in use have your peer send a static public key to the other one, I require you to provide a proof when setting up your peer. Think about a signature from an authoritative root signing key.
• if the pattern in use have your peer receive a static public key from the other one, I require you to provide a callback function to verify that key, optionally using payloads sent during the handshake (for example, a certificate containing a signature).

To make things truly plug-and-play, I've created helper functions that let you generate an authoritative root signing key and create proofs or callbacks for a set of parameters. I've written some documentation here that should get you started in no time. If things are broken (this is a beta) or not clear please let me now.

And again, don't use this in production.

The biggest achievement of this implementation though is the fact that it is implementing the net.Conn interface of the Golang standard library. This mean that if you're already using networking code in your Go application, you can just replace your net.Conn or tls.Conn with noise.Conn and things will continue to work seamlessly.