A place for EricHopper to enter his random thoughts

Revamp of CAKE Protocol

More misdesign in current BirthdayCAKE

I added a bunch of items to ToDo detailing what should be fixed.

Talk with Cheyanne

I need better ways of explaining this to people. Especially people who just want to use email to communicate, and not be bothered with the fiddly little details.

Cheyanne says "the explanation on the webpage wasn't a very good explanation"
Omnifarious nods.
Omnifarious says "What does it leave you confused about?"
Cheyanne says "everything, not counting that it uses public key encryption"
Omnifarious says "OK."
Omnifarious says "It's a protocol in which the source and destination addresses are public key identifiers."
Cheyanne says "how the public keys are managed, which keys are used where, why it's a good idea"
Cheyanne says "well that's not a protocol"
Omnifarious says "What do you mean by managed?"
Cheyanne says "that's an address resolution scheme"
Omnifarious says "OK."
Omnifarious says "I would say addressing scheme, not resolution scheme."
Cheyanne says "yes"
Cheyanne says "there's some lack of clarity on that point"
Omnifarious says "There is no global repository of public keys."
Omnifarious says "There is a sub-protocol within CAKE for mapping public key addresses to topological addresses."

Implemented thoughts

CAKE key/TopologicalAddress stuff

This is now done with the CAKENIP protocol.

Keeping track of associations between keys and TopologicalAddresses...

You need an information request message. If it's in the clear, in can be answered by a random entity. If it's not, it can only be answered by the entity you send it to.

You need a message to reply as well. That message must be able to contain a bunch of assertion messages inside itself.

Should they be separate message types? Depends on if a message type denotes the format of the message or the protocol its in. For example, all DNS messages go on UDP port 53, even though the format of a request and reply are rather different.

Generator in ReferenceImplementation

This has now also been completed. Though it's only been completed for generating messages, not parsing them.

The Generator system in BirthdayCAKE needs changing to allow you to more flexibly add new types.

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