Secnet progress

[Ian Jackson]

Mark Wooding writes ("Secnet progress"):
> I (still :-( ) haven't gone back to read Ian's previous email comments;
> I'm just blundering on ahead, in the vague hope that it won't be too
> hard to fix things so that other people don't hate them.

If you don't ever intend to go through my previous comments then
please say and I will do it.  I think it will save review work to be
able to see what I wrote before for the same patch.  Until then I am
trying to hold off reviewing your latest resubmissions...

> `mdw/springclean' contains some miscellaneous fixes, a Wireshark
> dissector, and a reorganization of the capability-bit handling.  This is
> stuff that my previous XDH work built on, but disentangled from that.

Thanks.  After review, I have pulled this into master.  I did have
some issues with it but I had to decide whether it would be a good
idea to go around another iteration with you.  I decided it would be
better to try to do myself whatever needed doing.  Particularly
because there's some stuff there which I wanted for my pubkey work and
I wanted to unblock myself.

This resulted in some further commits 5d903ef..ce32dd8 which I think
will contain one trivial semantic conflict with your xdh branch (which
will be detected by the compiler).

I wanted to make some specific observations in the hope of making
our collaboration easier:

 * Thank you very much for the capability-related rework of which
   I thoroughly approve.

 * "magic.h: Present message labels as an encoding of major
    and minor numbers."
   The motivation for this commit is not presented.  This is not
   really ideal for review of a complex new idea as part of a "spring
   clean" series.  I nearly decided to drop this patch from my push
   for this reason but ultimately I chose to take it on faith.

 * "site.c: Abstract out the various parts of capability handling."
   suffers slightly from the same problem, although I can guess why
   something like this might be wanted.

 * "secnet-wireshark.lua: Add a Wireshark dissector."
   Should something install this somewhere ?

 * This list is in addition to the changes I made myself in
   5d903ef..ce32dd8, which I'd appreciate it if you looked at.

 * I write commit message titles without trailinng full stops.  This
   allows one additional character of useful content and IMO makes
   quoted commit message titles look less odd.  I decided not to
   rewrite your branch for this tiny bikeshed :-).

> `mdw/xdh' contains the rest of my XDH work, and is where I'm currently
> working.  It starts by refactoring the DH closure interface, then moves
> onto DH group negotiation, and then adds Bernstein's X25519 and X448.

I have not looked at this at all for the reason I give above.  Please
let me know whether you think I should review it all de novo, or go
back to my mails from before, or wait, or what.

Thanks,
Ian.

-- 
Ian Jackson <ijackson at chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.

If I emailed you from an address @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is
a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.