Suites

DiME, the open and trust-based data format building secure Application-based Public-Key Infrastructures (APKIs) in a breeze.

A foundation principle of the DiME design is minimizing options and decisions, and this is equally relevant for the choice of algorithms to use. DiME uses pre-defined cryptographic suits with the intention to remove much of need of detailed understanding and expert knowledge with cryptography.

Currently only one suite has been defined, the "salt" suite (NaCl), based on the popular Networking and Cryptography library.

Usage	Algorithm
Digital signature	Ed25519 (EdDSA)
Key agreement (exchange)	X25519 (ECDH)
Secret key encryption	XSalsa20-Poly1305 (AE)
Hash function	BLAKE2

The suggested implementation of this cryptography suite is the tried and tested libsodium library which has numerous bindings to diffrent languages and plaforms..

Although the DiME format itself does not solve the need to understand and properly use these algorithms, the idea is that the available reference implementation will remove this need.

The use of a specific suite is closely associated with the raw data of keys. Here is an example of an encryption key:

NaCl.eDYvQUipW45guJvDoc13iFQkMwNZUJcBaqJWN7JguG5DVfQED

As the header of DiME items, the raw key data starts with a header indicating the cryptographic suite used, in this case ‘NaCl’. The header ‘NaCl’ is used for the DiME standard cryptographic suite.